Having struggled to adapt to life at the London Stadium since their move to Stratford over the summer, there are plenty of West Ham fans longing for the familiar surroundings of their spiritual home, Upton Park. They yearn for the dreamy days where they blew bubbles into the flat, granite skies above Green Street, and walked the concrete concourses of their charming home of 112 years. They pine for the simple pleasures of E13, their old seats and accustomed vantage points. They ache with desire for the ground they've left behind.They'll have to get over it, unfortunately, as a large chunk of Upton Park has now been blown to pieces with explosives.In footage that rams home the finality of West Ham's move to the corporate confines of Stratford, one of the corner stands at Upton Park is sent sky high by a controlled explosion. Thousands of memories are demolished before our eyes, in order to make way for a large number of identikit flats. A century of footballing heritage is shredded by an industrial amount of powerful combustibles, before bits of debris rain down on the pitch, forlorn.For West Ham fans, this must make for heartbreaking footage. For the rest of us, it's either a matter of indifference, transitory pleasure or full-on schadenfreude, depending on how much we like explosions and/or dislike West Ham.
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