Someone from last night’s night shift left me a copy of his local paper to look at today. His local paper is the Newham Recorder, and it has 14 pages of news, reports and photos relating to West Ham’s promotion. That is not including the victory parade on Tuesday which happened too late for their deadline but will occupy a large expanse of newsprint next week.

Even as a happy Hammer myself I am overwhelmed by the amount of claret and blue in the paper. Surely there is a global shortage of those colour inks in the East End now. But I am sure the Crawley News would get just as excitable if Crawley Town ever got promoted to the Premier League.

Half the stories outside the pull-out special relate in some way to WHUFC, even down to reports from the latest planning committee meeting of the council about the football club’s plans to redevelop the East Stand and what sort of gains the community will get through section 106-type arrangements.

Several things struck me about this newspaper. The first was how much more there was to it than our two local papers (and how intrinsically interesting it was. Not earth-shattering maybe, but worth reading even for someone with no local involvement at all.) I also noticed that the paper seemed to be broadly supportive of the local council and Labour politics – far more so than I am used to here. The most striking thing though was the sense of just how important the football club is to the area.

It is not just a matter of pride in the fact of having an historic and well-established club in the borough, which is now getting more success, but also the real impact the club has on local schools and sport generally, as well as an economic effect. Its no wonder that so many people born and raised around there would not dream of supporting any other club and remain so loyal throughout life.

In terms of its dominance of everything local, West Ham is to Newham what Gatwick is to Crawley. The major differences being that Gatwick airport is never likely to win the FA cup, and if you want to get to Europe you won’t bother with West Ham…

So now I am feeling a bit jealous of Newham. They have a better football club, they have a more interesting local paper, they have a council with 59 out of 60 Labour councillors and no Tories at all, and their local paper seems to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. But, on balance, I think I’m happier where I am, and have no great urge to move back to London.