I’ve spent a fair bit of time over the years looking out of hotel windows at all sorts of views - at cities spread out below, mountains towering above, lakes shimmering in the dawn light, and even, in the case of a particularly cheap and not very cheerful motel in New York, a brick wall 2ft feet away - but I’ve never seen anything like this. There, almost within touching distance, is a sight that would make small boys, and certain men, dribble and gibber with excitement.

Because this room looks out onto a football pitch, not at some local park or recreation ground, but at West Ham United football club - where England’s World Cup-winning captain, Bobby Moore, repelled so many attacks, and where Trevor Brooking, Tony Cottee and Paolo Di Canio began so many more while wearing the claret and blue.

No, I haven’t sneaked my sleeping bag under my bobble hat or scaled the walls in pyjamas. West Ham’s main stand (or the Dr Martens stand, as, tragically, it is officially called) doubles as a hotel, containing 65 rooms, of which 63 look out onto the grass.

On match days, those travelling significant distances to see the game, or who simply fancy making their pilgrimage that bit more devotional, can go to the match, hit the town in celebration - or, on those rare occasions when West Ham fail to win, drown their considerable sorrows - and then repair back to the stadium.

Millennium & Copthorne, Chelsea Football Club

Good-value, brilliantly positioned, but frankly a rather ordinary hotel, says Tom Chesshyre

The Old Trafford Lodge, Manchester

A bedroom that leads onto a balcony which looks over the cricket pitch

Related Internet Links

• More hotels, villas and B&Bs in our where to stay section

Related Links

• Millennium & Copthorne, Chelsea Football Club

• The Old Trafford Lodge, Manchester

I’m not a West Ham supporter (worse than that, I’m a Spurs fan who declines the Hammers’ supporters’ rousing exhortations to “Stand up if you hate Tottenham” on regular occasions), but for any lover of the infuriating game, it’s an extraordinary thing, staring out onto a Premier League pitch, side by side not with 30,000 other rabid, screaming fanatics, but with a groundsman and a pigeon. It’s eerie and, however pathetic this sounds, just a little bit magical.

Brace yourself, but I’ve got a theory about this. Football stadiums, night-clubs and churches are inextricably linked. They’re places where groups of people come to worship, in uplifting, harmonious, cacophonous ways, but once they all tip out afterwards, the buildings take on this other-worldly dimension - silent, still and utterly at odds with what went before. But no less awe-inspiring.

From Sunday to Thursday, the West Ham United Hotel is your common-or-garden three-star business hostelry, serving those with appointments in the City, at the ExCel centre or in London’s Docklands. And for the club, it’s a nice little earner.

There are 19 home games in the Premier League, and even allowing for the odd European game, preseason friendly, corporate jolly or local community activity, that’s still an awful lot of time when the stadium facilities lie empty. Filling the stand with paying guests goes some way to recouping those costs.

On match days, residents are booted out early so the rooms can be turned into corporate boxes. There’s a cupboard, roughly the size of the one that housed Harry Potter, into which the bed is deposited by a team of packing elves. A large table is fashioned from two pillows and a tube of shower gel (or it might have been in the cupboard all along, I blinked at that point), and cutlery and cups appear magically from elsewhere.

Plain white cups, that is. Not ones decorated with the West Ham coat of arms, as they are on the hotel’s web-site. They used to have those, but they were rather regularly “removed”. So, too, the West Ham pens, notepads, plates, saucers and kitchen sinks. Everything is plain now and consequently has a longer life expectancy within the hotel. Keen collectors of memorabilia, these West Ham fans.

There’s a restaurant serving traditional British grub for dinner and breakfast - and having sampled its full English, I can confirm that it doesn’t double up as the players’ canteen - and a serviceable bar downstairs.

Despite all this, compared with, say, the Champs-Elysées or Fifth Avenue, Green Street is perhaps unlikely to top a list of the world’s finest hotel locations. From Upton Park Tube station you walk past Queen’s Market, with its green awnings on which is printed the inspiring slogan “Set to get better”. There’s a sign above a corner shop that reminds the reader “Don’t kill your wife”, before suggesting “Let us do it for you”. But moving quickly on from such rugged, rustic charm - and, to be honest, I would move quickly on if it’s after pub hours - the stadium and the hotel are smart and clean.

And now the football season is up and running, for away fans or distant Hammers making the trip to the East End, the opportunity to look out at midnight, as I did, onto the turf, wipe the Saturday night from their eyes, and glimpse the ghost of Bobby Moore warming up down on the touchline is not something on offer at any other hotel in the world.

Double room £85, B&B, not including match tickets, which are available from £35 at the West Ham box office (0870 112 2700, www.whufc.com ). Other football teams that have hotels in their stadiums include Chelsea (see below), Bolton, Coventry, Reading and Kilmarnock

ROOMS FOR SCORING
Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, Chelsea:not part of the Stamford Bridge stadium itself, the hotel (020 7565 1400, www.millenniumhotels.co.uk ) is adjacent to the ground in the Chelsea FC village. Match-day packages cost from £175pp, including dinner, breakfast and match tickets.

Marriott at Twickenham: when it opens in mid-November, the hotel at Twickers (020 8744 0346, www.london marriotttwickenham.co.uk ) will have six pitch-view rooms, costing up to £500 per night, room-only, on Six Nations days and during the four Autumn Internationals.

Rogers Centre, Toronto:home to the Blue Jays baseball team and the Argonauts Canadian football team, the Rogers Centre (formerly SkyDome) houses the Renaissance Toronto Downtown (00800 1927 1927, www.marriott.co.uk ), with 70 pitch-view doubles from £94pp, room-only.

Amangalla, Sri Lanka:one room - No 14 - at this Aman resort in the grounds of Galle Fort (00800 2255 2626, www.amanresorts.com ) overlooks Galle’s iconic cricket ground. Doubles from £300, room-only; suites, including “room 14”, from £410.

Jeremy Lazell

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