Moss Side, on a dank, inhospitable November morning. On Blue Moon Way, mums and dads are on the school run outside Divine Mercy Primary. The house names are the clue: the Allison, the Corrigan, the Goater, the Rosler. Eventually this road will be painted blue, for old times’ sake. The school is where the Kippax once stood and there is a sales office advertising homes for the Centre Spot, where Bell, Summerbee and Lee once bewitched the crowds, “Ballet on Ice” was formed and, though it doesn’t appear in the brochures, Jamie Pollock scored one of the great comedy own goals.

It is 12 years since Manchester City severed their ties with Maine Road, for so long such a vital, sometimes poignant, part of the city’s life, and on the neighbouring streets it is the same theme of change. The pubs of the day – the Beehive, the Gardeners Arms, the Sherwood, the Clarence and at least eight others – have just about all gone. The Parkside, where City fans of a certain generation may remember there was always a collection on the door (“for the kids”), is now a block of apartments. Shops and takeaways have disappeared, unable to survive without the takings of match days, and around the country there is inevitably the same lament surrounding our other lost grounds.

Ayresome Park, the Baseball Ground, Roker Park, Highbury, the Dell, the Den, Ninian Park, Gay Meadow and Boothferry Park, plus many others, are housing estates or apartments. Filbert Street is a halls of residence for Leicester’s university students. Eastville, formerly the home of Bristol Rovers, is now an Ikea store. Leeds Road, where Huddersfield Town were once the force of English football, is a retail park, the centre spot marked by a plaque outside B&Q. Brighton’s Goldstone Ground has been replaced by a drive-through Burger King and Burnden Park is an Asda where, if you look closely, you can see a picture of Nat Lofthouse and other black-and-white Bolton Wanderers images behind the checkouts. One by one, so many of our great grounds are disappearing and sliding into history.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The housing estate, featuring the centre-circle of Manchester City’s old Maine Road, is still only half-finished 12 years after the club moved. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

Altogether, more than a third of clubs in the top four divisions have upgraded since Middlesbrough began the trend in 1995, five years after the Taylor Report was published into Hillsborough. The Manor Ground in Oxford is now a hospital. Vetch Field was turned into allotments after Swansea City moved out and, if it sounds strange to think of people growing fruit and vegetables at the home of Ivor Allchurch, just consider what happened to Highfield Road, Coventry City’s ground in the days when they managed 34 consecutive years in the top division, and how the old place is commemorated.

That area has been hit hard, too. The faded paintwork of “Cut the Blues” can just about be made out on the old barber’s shop on the corner of Swan Lane. But the former servicemen’s club is long gone and the Binley Oak, one of Coventry’s great ska pubs, where The Specials formed their sound and the team worked out in what became the old billiards room, is now a school. The new housing estate, all yellows and oranges, stands out among the surrounding red-brick terraces and there is an element of tragicomedy about the sculpture, the “City”, that was put up to mark 106 years of the club’s history. The sculptor clearly was not a Coventry fan, getting three of the four dates wrong, one by 24 years. The club’s original name, Singers FC, is missing its second “S” and the picture of a sewing machine is the equivalent of putting Lady Godiva in a donkey jacket and steel-capped boots. Singers, to clarify, took their name from Coventry’s bicycle factory, not the New York sewing machine company.

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Facebook Twitter Pinterest West Ham fans sit around a bronze statue celebrating the club’s 1966 World Cup winners. Photograph: Marc Atkins/Marc Atkins / Offside

For West Ham’s supporters, it is their turn to contemplate what it will be like when the wrecking ball arrives. West Bromwich Albion are at the Boleyn Ground on Sunday but, after that, it is strange to think there are only 12 more league fixtures before they turn the lights off for the last time and start to dismantle the John Lyall Gates.

“Success, failure, heroism, stupidity, talent, skulduggery … Upton Park has seen it all,” Brian Williams writes in Nearly Reach the Sky, his book bidding farewell to the old place. But the bulldozers will be in soon. West Ham will start next season in the Olympic Stadium and Williams, a Hammerholic of 50 years, is one of the fans who, being perfectly honest, doesn’t really want to go.

“No doubt, on occasions, it will be packed with bubble-blowing supporters who will sing their hearts out as they dream dreams and scheme schemes. But I can’t believe a stadium like that will ever be able to generate the passion and the involvement of the people who have made the club what it is in the same way as the Boleyn Ground. Yes, in property terms we’re trading up to posher premises, although I wonder at what cost to us as supporters? East Ham, meanwhile, will have a few new flats where it once had a heart. I fear for its future, as I fear for ours.”

In the Boleyn pub, on the corner of Green Street and Barking Road, they are already preparing for the worst. They reckon this pub has the longest horse-shoe bar in London (as well as possibly the stickiest carpet) and they are asking regulars to pay £120 annual membership to stop the place being boarded up and fund buses to the Olympic stadium. The posters in the windows read like an SOS: “Keep the Boleyn Pub Alive.”

The Black Lion in Plaistow, another West Ham stronghold, is also looking at transporting fans to Stratford but at least one of the other pubs in the area is reputedly going to sell up as soon as the season ends. The Doctor Who shop on Barking Road should be all right but it is easy to understand why the locals are worrying about what will happen to some of the businesses that have come to rely on West Ham, and why many supporters are feeling slightly raw about shipping a lifetime of memories from London E13 to another postal district.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Local businesses may suffer when West Ham move away from the Boleyn Ground. Photograph: Scott Heavey/Getty Images

Those fans will soon be getting their pre-match food from a Westfield shopping centre where the restaurants go by names such as Pho, Umai, Indi-Go, Shake Shack and Lotus Leaf. But what does that mean for Nathan’s Pies and Eels, where the queues on match days snake down Barking Road? Or Ken’s Cafe, where there is a china bulldog in the doorway wearing claret and blue and Carole behind the counter was once described by Pete May, author of several West Ham books, as “the best manager we never had”?

The club may be upgrading but it is hard to shake the feeling many of their supporters would rather be tucking into a plate of bubble and squeak, or “sloppy eggs, chips and beans” at the unpretentious greasy spoon where Carole and Ken have been lifting the shutters at 7am every day for the past 49 years.

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Others will argue football has moved on. West Ham, they would say, have to ditch their image as a family club of long-suffering cockneys and take their first steps into a brave new world, where the next generation of supporters will be the wealthy offspring of pinstriped Canary Wharf executives rather than classic East Enders. They may have a point, too. Football has become a business where, at its highest end, money seems to be the way we keep the score. Of course it benefits West Ham to move to their shiny new home, with the prospect of a shiny new future.

Equally, if you value tradition in football you will understand those supporters’ feelings and, similarly, you may be glad, relieved even, that Liverpool’s proposed move to Stanley Park never came off and that other places, among them Stamford Bridge, Craven Cottage and the City Ground, appear to have been spared.

Everton hopefully can do the same. Goodison Park may be cramped, ageing and, yes, a bit tatty round the edges but, in another sense, that is part of its charm. It is almost shoehorned into those tight rows of terraced houses but it is one of the dwindling number of grounds that still has atmosphere inside and out.

Take a walk down Goodison Road and you can feel the history. Breathe in the smells – the fish and chips, the beer fumes, sometimes topped off by the piles of dung left by police horses. It doesn’t sound pleasant, does it? Yet, somehow, it works. There is a soul here, created over 100 years, that cannot be found, or recreated, at a gleaming out-of-town bowl, with a park-and-ride scheme and a Frankie & Benny’s next door.

But this is increasingly the way football is heading. Thirty-six out of the 92 clubs have moved grounds in the past 20 years and soon it will be nearer to one out of every two. White Hart Lane will have been entirely redeveloped by the time Tottenham Hotspur start the 2018-19 season. Scunthorpe, York, Brentford, Carlisle, Gillingham, Bristol Rovers and Southend are all committed to, or have been looking at, new stadiums.

Others will follow and more football people will come to understand, from first-hand experience, why many West Ham supporters are feeling so delicate. Williams puts it rather neatly: “Ever since it was confirmed we are to leave the area that has been the club’s home since 1904 I’ve been chalking off each game in the same way a condemned man scratches the wall of his prison cell to mark the passing of his last days on Earth, knowing the hangman’s noose will inevitably be wrapped around his neck by the end of it all. Frankly, it’s not a good way to feel.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Boleyn pub is fearing for its future. Photograph: Adam Davy/PA

Gary Firmager – look for a man on a small step-ladder in Green Street before any home match – knows the feeling. He set up Over Land and Sea fanzine in 1989, but this season will be its last. He, too, is counting down the games. “I’m an old dinosaur,” he explains. “This is where I belong. I wish everyone well who goes on but I’m not going on with them.”

Around the area, they are taking in the news that the Champions Statue, unveiled in 2003 by Prince Andrew, with Bobby Moore in the classic pose, holding the Jules Rimet trophy, flanked by Geoff Hurst, Martin Peters and Ray Wilson, is going to Stratford, too. “It will just be a blank space, I suppose,” Viv, manager of Newham Bookshop across the road, says wistfully. “It used to be a toilet many years ago.”

Other places, she says, will inevitably go the same way as Cafe Cassettari’s, where Malcolm Allison and the rest of the “Cassettari’s Crew” famously used to discuss tactics, moving the salt and pepper pots around the table to make their points. Cassettari’s closed a few years back. It is now a solicitor’s office and no one should be too surprised if the old claret and blue facade eventually goes, too.

At the same time, there are butchers, hair salons, clothes and furniture shops and market-stall holders, turning right outside Upton Park underground station, who are clinging to the hope an influx of new residents will actually be better for them than sporadic invasion of football fans. West Ham’s ground is earmarked for more than 800 properties but a local protest movement, the Boleyn Development campaign, has opposed the initial proposals. The campaigners, with a stall on Queen’s Market, want more affordable housing and landscaped gardens for one of the capital’s more deprived areas.

At least, however, there is some form of momentum. Stoke City left the Victoria Ground 18 years ago and it is now a monument to neglect, a piece of derelict, fenced-off land branded an “eyesore” by the local residents’ association. One man, campaigning to turn it into a park, tried to force the issue a few years back by putting up a tent and squatting for six weeks. The bailiffs kicked him off and there are plans to put up houses at some point. No one, however, seems sure about exactly when that will be.

Back in Manchester the housing estate that will be known as the Maine Place is still only half-finished, even though the football club moved out 12 years ago. Workmen in hard hats are still on site. It has been a grind – so slow that the first intake of kids at Divine Mercy will have moved on to secondary school by the time the blue paint finally goes down – and in the meantime it has been difficult to keep up with the number of businesses that have gone under. That is the thing about these lost grounds: people underestimate sometimes what they meant to the local community.