The club’s long-awaited shift to Stratford, which became graphic this week with the submission of the latest planning application for the Stadium “wrap design”, has only served to make this follower more keenly aware of the unique and increasingly poignant setting of the Boleyn Ground at Upton Park, in which West Ham’s fortunes have by no means always hidden since that earlier relocation from Plaistow’s Memorial Grounds in 1904.

The final game at Upton Park, we now know, will be the re-arranged Premier League fixture against Manchester United on Tuesday, May 10, and the club has said that plans for a farewell ceremony are “at an advanced stage.” After which the hallowed ground of E13 will be re-developed into an “East End Village” involving 700 homes to be built around central public gardens where the pitch is currently laid. Highbury all over again.

Generations of football supporters have visited the club’s much-modified home ground down the years. For each fan, the memories are unique and personal.

I have had the privilege of attending Upton Park over the last 30-odd years in a professional capacity as one of the oddly disproportionate number of football writers who happen to support West Ham - and happen to wangle the opportunity of covering them whenever possible, while remaining, of course, strictly impartial at all times.

Recollections from these years of coverage are not all lyrical. For instance, Billy Bonds - manager now rather than buccaneering player - putting a brave face on a final 2-1 home defeat by Notts County which meant Oldham Athletic rather than West Ham took the 1991 Second Division title. Never mind – still went up.

Two years later, as news broke of Bobby Moore’s death, I got to the ground in time to see the first scarves being reverently knotted into the main gates by grieving supporters.

For some reason I can always recall a moment of apparent deliberation by Julian Dicks before he went ahead and trod on the head of  Chelsea's floored forward John Spencer during a 3-1 home defeat in 1995, earning - a booking.

Still clear in the memory, too, the young Rio Ferdinand - tenacious, and audacious; the neat and well appreciated efforts of Steve Potts; David James’s horrible goal kicks; Slaven Bilic’s long overdue defensive realpolitik; the seismic energy of Carlos Tevez.

But the most vivid memories are the early, magical ones when the trip to Upton Park was personal rather than professional.

My dad is not particularly interested in football, so for him to take me to my first West Ham match when I was an eager 11-year-old was, I now fully realise, a loving duty.

The press of bodies queuing for the stairs at Upton Park District Line tube station – how strange that you had to go two stops past West Ham to see West Ham! – was quite unfamiliar to me, and a little scary. No such crowds ever thronged the platform of our departure point near the western end of the Metropolitan Line, Chorleywood – described by former Poet Laureate John Betjeman as the quintessential “Metroland” in his memorable 1973 documentary of that name.

How unfamiliar too the smell of cigarettes, burgers and cooked onions once we got out of the station and began our slow progress along Green Street towards the arena I had only previously glimpsed on television, or in pictures of players that festooned my bedroom walls, three of which boasted the autographs of West Ham’s holy trinity – Geoff Hurst, Bobby Moore, Martin Peters. They were the World Cup winners… and on that mild October Saturday in 1969, England were still a year away from losing their title in Mexico.

The opponents on the day were Sunderland – beaten 8-0 in the same fixture the previous season, with Hurst scoring six of the goals, albeit one, by his own admission, via a fist. But my naïve expectations of a similar rout were frustrated as an early goal by Peters – soon to move to Tottenham Hotspur in an exchange deal with Jimmy Greaves - was equalised by Billy Hughes. Result 1-1.

The match reports from the Evening Standard (Bernard Joy), The Observer (Michael Wale) and The Guardian (Albert Barham) went into my West Ham scrapbook for 1969-1970, the first of seven seasonal records I kept of the team’s cuttings before University terminated the adolescent devotion partway through season 1976-1977.

Of course I wanted West Ham to win. But the thrill of being actually there, actually watching Moore, Hurst, Peters, Harry Redknapp, Trevor Brooking only tens of yards away, was incomparable. You could even hear them shouting! And of course you could hear other people shouting. One old man kept calling out “Come on you Irons!” Why was he saying that? Everyone knew West Ham’s nickname was the Hammers…

Some people always remember their first trip to the cinema or the theatre. Or their first holiday abroad. Personally, at the moment when I finished climbing the seemingly endless, switchback stairs and emerged high above the green of a pitch already busy with idols engaged in their warm-ups, Upton Park was the most exciting place I had ever been. Nowhere has beaten it since.