For Dulwich Hamlet fans, supporting their team is a philosophical pursuit. It’s about fighting fascism and homophobia while eating bratwurst and knocking back the craft beer. Katie Forster joins the hip crowd

Pink and blue scarves are south London’s new must-have accessory. They’re on morning trains and draped over chairs in pubs; children sport them on their scooters while their parents wear them to the supermarket. Even James Nesbitt has one.

Dulwich Hamlet FC, a non-league team, has seen an extraordinary surge in support over the last few years. A record crowd of 3,000 turned up to the final game of last season against Maidstone FC, and fan numbers continue to grow.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Somewhere between real and a piss-take’: Dulwich Hamlet FC fan art.

My own scarf lies bobbly and moth-eaten in a drawer at my parents’ house. One grey day in the late ’90s, my dad had taken my brother and me to join a handful of grimly loyal supporters, in the bleak stands of a stadium behind a supermarket, who shivered and clapped politely as the players jogged their way to a disappointing draw. The whole miserable experience put me off football for the next 15 years.

But now, around the same pitch at the end of last season, the old die-hards are surrounded by legions of new support. “We are professional! Semi-professional!” the fans roar with pride at the team’s position near the top of the regional Isthmian League.

“This is the best I’ve had as a Dulwich fan in 40 years,” says Mishi Morath, who has been coming to Dulwich Hamlet games since he was seven. “For many years here it was like normal football – it was rubbish. You went because it was a chore, because it was what you did.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘This level isn’t just kicking hoof and knocking about in the mud. It’s decent football’: Dulwich Hamlet’s match against Maidstone FC. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

“Normal football” this isn’t. A new season of Dulwich Hamlet games kicked off this month and each match costs only £10 to attend, attracting a diverse crowd disillusioned with Premier League extortion and regulations. They crack open cans beside the pitch or buy pints of craft beer brewed in Peckham and eat bratwurst topped with sauerkraut from a pop-up stand – we are in gentrified East Dulwich, after all.

“Other clubs might say we’re all students, hipsters and a few four-letter words, but when you actually speak to them, the truth is they’re jealous,” says Morath.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An anti-Ukip Dulwich Hamlet sticker inspired by their German sister team, Altona 93.

Dulwich Hamlet’s unlikely new explosion of support, with attendance regularly in the thousands, is the envy of the non-league: Bath City FC recently sent down a representative to see what the fuss is about.

The new Dulwich Hamlet superfans, who call themselves The Rabble, are aware of their peculiarity – one of their slogans is: “Ordinary morality is for ordinary football clubs.”

“It’s actually a quote from Aleister Crowley, a well-known satanist,” explains supporter Jack Spearman. “There is a leftwing element to it, but only because if you’re not leftwing, you’re wrong.”

Last season the team played a ground-breaking friendly against Stonewall FC, an LGBT rights charity, and regularly organise community activism such as supporting a food bank and a campaign to pay cinema workers the living wage.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest True colours: fans get political before the Stonewall FC game. Photograph: Daniel Lynch/Eyevine

The Rabble’s forays into mainstream politics include insulting the other team’s goalie by calling him a Lib Dem and making anti-Ukip Dulwich Hamlet stickers inspired by their German sister team, Altona 93. “The German version has a fist through a swastika; ours has a fist through Nigel Farage’s face,” says Duncan Hart of the Dulwich Hamlet Supporters Trust.

Spearman is a member of the ComFast Chapter, a close-knit faction of fans who drink Buckfast, wear special scarves with red stars on them and describe themselves on Twitter as a “hard-left drinking society” and the “Nipple-rubbing Nouveau Niche”. Their allusions to communism and highbrow critical theory, which their neon-haired, pink camouflage-trousered leader Robert Molloy-Vaughan calls “somewhere between real and a piss-take”, have earned Dulwich Hamlet fans a reputation for being utopian bolsheviks.

But behind their rowdy, tongue-in-cheek activity – which ranges from YouTube videos splicing match footage with arthouse film clips to match posters encouraging people to get down to the game, as “Dulwich Hamlet will not be televised” – the new fans are adamant that the Hamlet buzz is more than just a political piss-up.

“There are a lot of apolitical people who come here because it’s affordable. The happy end is that they find out the football is great, it’s more open and creative, which you can see on the terrace,” says Molloy-Vaughan .

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Observer writer Katie Forster and her father watching the match against Maidstone FC. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

The democratic Supporters Trust is trying to integrate Dulwich Hamlet one step further into the community through fan ownership. The club is currently owned by Hadley Property Group. In the UK, only around 40 of thousands of football clubs are fully or partly fan-owned, as opposed to in Germany, where majority control by a single person or organisation is outlawed, and Argentina, where every club is owned by its fans.

Annabel Kiernan, a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, has spotted a pattern at non-league level across the country, not least at her own fan-owned team FC United, formed in reaction to the 2005 American takeover of Manchester United.

“It’s trying to recreate football before post-Hillsborough measures came in. Lots of those were positive, but it did marginalise what was previously the mainstream audience – men who wanted to stand by the pitch and drink in the stands,” she says.

The fans’ respect for the club’s past certainly dispels accusations of them as shallow, bandwagon-jumping hipsters. They talk about a revival of 80s terrace culture and even hark back to the club’s glory days of the 30s, chanting the name of star scorer Edgar Kail, who played for England between the wars, when the now-demolished old stadium overflowed with more than 30,000 people.

Now the pink-and-blue army are using social media to drum up interest in games far removed from Match of the Day. Supporters who couldn’t make an away fixture gathered in a pub around their phones instead of the TV. “When it came up on the tweets that Dulwich had scored, half the pub were cheering. They were all following it on social media and Twitter. The pub was in uproar,” says Morath.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Every game’s a carnival’: supporters walking on the pitch following the final whistle. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

Hugo Greenhalgh and Ben Sibley produce a podcast called Forward the Hamlet and have been surprised by the number of dedicated fans who tune in.

“It’s about making people aware that this level isn’t just kicking hoof and knocking about in the mud,” says Greenhalgh. “It’s decent football.”

Molloy-Vaughan agrees, saying that while he enjoys having a pint with the players after a game, he likes to pretend there is a separation, “because I like to hero worship them”.

Dulwich Hamlet consistently play at the top of their division, meaning that promotion into the upper echelons of the non-league, Conference South, is a realistic possibility. While Molloy-Vaughan thinks promotion would be “orgasmic,” Hart disagrees: “That would involve more money, more travel to away games, no more beer on the terrace [due to regulations]. It starts cutting out the reason you’re coming here.”

As for me, I’m wondering whether the same team that put me off football might be drawing me back in. Fifteen years after my first match, I’m starting to feel some of the rapturous communal energy I’d heard football fans talk about but never understood.

At half time, fans hang up homemade banners with in-jokes and leftwing slogans. “This is Tuscany,” proclaims one, a nod to the pointy trees around the pitch. “Transpontine,” says another, a mock-intellectual reference to south London. A third declares solidarity with anti-fascist supporters of Altona 93; two have been involved in a scuffle with right-wing thugs.

“Every game’s a carnival – it’s such a welcoming crowd,” says Morath. “There’s lots of women, kids. It’s party time.”