In the end, almost a century of history was over in the blink of an eye. A little before 9.30pm on Sunday night, the dogs settled into their traps, the flood-lit crowd – their conversations visible in the frigid air – hushed without cue, and on the far side of the track, a streak of orange set off. “Hare is on the move, hare is on the move.”

Up in the commentary booth, Robin Carter, the long-time caller, raised his microphone and gathered pace too. “Away we go for the last race ever at Crayford,” he began, his voice steadily climbing. He would allow himself a moment of emotion, but not until the job was done.

And round the flapping plastic “hare” came, searing past the traps on the outer rail, before the greyhounds set off for the final time. While they ran, a full house treated it just like any other race. “Come on, number six,” one punter repeated, as if his fortune depended on it.

Barely 23 seconds later, the three-year-old bitch Kilmagner Flash (alas, not number six) crossed the line first. A small ripple of applause broke out. Staff gave one another hugs. Some present stared forwards in quiet reflection. A few headed to the bar. Others made their way towards the exits. It was still a working day in the morning, after all.

And with that, Crayford became the latest greyhound racing stadium to shut its doors for good.

A town on the south-east hem of London, where the capital meets Kent, lost what was once its most famous attraction. A community let go of a piece of its history. And a sport whose future looks bleaker by the year took another savage blow. Going to the dogs is, well, going to the dogs. Can anything halt the decline?

For something that has long seemed old-fashioned, greyhound racing is still surprisingly young, as sports go. The first modern race happened only in 1926 at Belle Vue in Manchester, when an enterprising American noticed Britain’s centuries-long interest in hare coursing and saw an opportunity for a cheap new working-class sport.

Around 1,700 people turned out for the first day of racing; within a few years, tens of millions of Britons were attending nearly 200 tracks all over the country. In the 1950s, as many as 70,000 spectators would drink and have a flutter several days a week at the dog racing in places such as White City, London.

Its instant popularity irked the bemused establishment – Winston Churchill dismissed it as little more than “animated roulette” – but the people loved it. As greyhound racing enthusiasts are so keen to tell you, at the 1966 football World Cup, France versus Uruguay had to be moved to White City Stadium because Wembley had greyhound racing on that day and the owners refused to reschedule it.

Such was the power of the new sport in the middle of the 20th century. At that time, there were 33 tracks in London alone. As of today, now that Crayford has turned off its lights, only one – Romford, another on the extreme edge of the city’s limits – remains. There are, in fact, only 19 tracks in the whole of the country.

Few in the industry are optimistic that that number will do anything other than shrink as the decade goes on. Before that, it may be that the issue is forced. Complaints about welfare standards and regulations abound, pushing calls for a phased ban on the sport. Wales is set to share the results of a consultation on the future of greyhound racing some time this year.

Crayford, which opened in 1986 on the site of another stadium built in the 1930s, saw fading attendances and a lack of trainer engagement before its closure was announced at the end of last year.

“We’ve been exploring various avenues to avoid this decision for some time but, ultimately, it is no longer viable for us to continue operating the site,” says Simon Clare, the UK communications director of Entain, the gambling giant which owned the track, as well as three others around the country. “The decision has not been taken lightly.”

The site of the stadium, a plum spot next to the train station, is ripe for development. That would not be without precedent. Many other historical tracks, including Portsmouth and Walthamstow, long ago became housing.

Mark Bird, the chief executive of the Greyhound Board of Great Britain (GBGB), is worried it won’t be the last to vanish. “We’ve got obvious concerns about this being the thin end of the wedge and [that] we’ll lose the other three [Entain] tracks as well,” he says. “But we’re probably getting to that number where the sport is sustainable; there’s not a lot of fat left.”

That seems an understatement. While some in the industry will insist that greyhound racing is perfectly healthy (the dubious claim that it is “the eighth or ninth-highest-attended sport in the country” can be heard often, despite various rankings not having it in the top 10), others cannot muster any positivity.

According to some statistics, attendance figures for the sport as a whole now hover at around a million per year. Rarely does a news headline bring anything other than rum news, either. Last month, New Zealand, one of only a few countries in the world where the sport still takes place, announced plans to ban it entirely from 2026, citing an “unacceptably high” rate of injuries.

That was music to the ears of the many people who have long lobbied against greyhound racing in the United Kingdom. Their objections begin and end with welfare, be it injuries the dogs can sustain while racing and cornering at more than 40mph, suggestions of rogue training practices, or what happens to the dogs after their racing careers finish.

In his tenure at GBGB, which is coming to an end when he retires in April, Bird, a former Metropolitan Police officer, has focused on improving welfare and decreasing the number of dogs hurt or euthanised in the sport. He has had success, but it is not enough for campaign groups.

In 2023, 109 greyhounds died racing on tracks throughout the country, according to the animal welfare charity Blue Cross. A further 55 were euthanised after they couldn’t be placed with new owners having stopped racing. Since 2017, more than 1,200 dogs have died at trackside and some 31,000 injuries have been sustained by the animals.

“Greyhound racing should be banned in the UK,” says Emma Judd, the head of campaigns and communications at the League Against Cruel Sports. “It’s cruel from the cradle to the grave. Something like one in three greyhounds that are active on the racing circuit will either be injured or killed [as a result of racing], so our stance is always: abolish. And I think it’s something most people would echo now.

“Back in the days when tracks started to close in the 1990s and 2000s, they used to say it was a loss to the local economy, because money would be taken on concessions and people would go out afterwards, et cetera. That doesn’t happen anymore, because people simply don’t attend greyhound races. Most of the time, the people who are there are connected to the greyhounds themselves. It’s for livestreaming [in bookmakers’ shops and online]. Its whole reason for being is betting.”

Polling certainly suggests most Britons are sceptical. According to a 2022 YouGov survey, nearly two thirds believe greyhound racing is “unimportant” to British culture. Meanwhile, just 5 per cent say the economic benefits it generates outweigh other considerations, with 81 per cent of the opinion that the welfare of the animals is more important than the jobs the sport creates.

On some days, it is difficult to argue with Judd’s assessment that it is largely put on for audiences at home. Under a wan, listless sky on the final Friday afternoon before Christmas, Central Park, a historical stadium in Sittingbourne, Kent, had precisely one person watching when I visited – and he owned several dogs that regularly race there.

“In fairness, it’s daytime. It’s much busier in the evenings. They’ll sell out the restaurant, you’d get a three-course meal while you watch,” the man said, keeping his eye on the races and tutting at one contest. Tracks that are doing well, such as Romford or Newcastle, do indeed focus on the whole package as a night out, structured around a meal and casual bets.

Yet other than him, the only other person visible in the stands at Central Park was a cameraman, diligently panning from left to right, then around, following the oval of the track time after time, to capture the action for gamblers all over the world. Indeed, thanks largely to streaming, Wales has seen a rise in the number of greyhound races, from 42 in November 2023 to 168 in October 2024, at its one track in Hengoed, Rhymney Valley. As with illegal hare coursing, there is a large online gambling market in eastern Europe and Asia. At some tracks, races are put on in the morning, in order to cater for time zones ahead of ours.

When it comes to welfare, horror stories – everything from doping to animal cruelty, including the culling of unwanted dogs too old to compete – exist and cannot be entirely stamped out, it seems. Those campaigning to end the sport claim many of the animals involved endure “miserable” existences, blighted by poor diets, bleak kennels and forced overexertion.

But the vast majority of people involved in the sport are nothing if not devoted to their greyhounds, and often have been for generations. “It’s a full-time life, rather than just a full-time job,” says Kelli Windebank, 43, an owner and trainer who fell for “the breed before the racing” when she started more than a decade ago.

She’s since owned around 10 dogs and trained dozens of others on her five acres in Fenland, Cambridgeshire. There is money in the sport for some, but the trainers and owners don’t see huge amounts. A few hundred pounds for a standard win, perhaps. A few thousand for a derby.

Some gamblers club together as syndicates and buy dogs, but invariably the money goes to faceless individuals watching online. Those left at the tracks often bet small and go for a jaunt, or else because they’re connected to the runners in some way. Windebank, who has been involved for only a dozen years, is a rare newcomer in an industry that struggles to find new blood.

“I didn’t like racing at first, I was against it. But it was my dog that changed my mind, because I believe my dog over people. And you only have to say to people who say the dogs don’t like racing, ‘OK, you hold this lead, you take this dog towards the track, then tell me what you think.’ Everyone tells you it’s cruel, but I saw a completely different story. People tell you they get dumped, but you see retired greyhounds who’ve been rehomed all over the country. They make amazing pets.”

It’s an argument you hear at tracks all over the country: greyhounds love to race. Indeed, it’s written above the bar at many stadiums. And it’s true, greyhounds are bred to run after something very fast, but campaigners on the other side are never going to be convinced that’s reason enough to maintain an industry around it. The wider public, most of whom have never seen the inside of a greyhound-racing track, would also take more convincing.

At Crayford, generations of the same families have turned up, time after time, for a night out at the dogs. It’s fun and inexpensive – unless you’re feeling lucky and the octogenarian on-site bookies, with their pencils and ledgers, shake you down. But on Sunday, with Crayford’s fate sealed, the question looming over proceedings was about the sport’s future.

A decade ago, many thought Crayford going was unthinkable. But before that, nobody saw all the other closures coming, either. There are already grave rumours about Hove, one of the 19 that are left.

It’s anyone’s guess what will happen in another 10 years. The whole thing might be banned. It may have faded out. And it may, just may, have ironed out its problems, turned a corner and found a new audience.

Windebank just wants “people to market it better”, to bring a younger, fresher crowd, rather than give off a sense of managed decline. “My daughter’s 21, and some of her friends don’t even know people still go greyhound racing,” she says. “Let’s let people know. Because you can’t change the racing, the tracks won’t change. And the dogs haven’t changed for hundreds of years.”

Bird, the man whose job has been to promote and clean up a sport which doesn’t exactly specialise in optimism, is confined to blind hope. “I’d like to think the sport still exists; next year is its 100th year,” he says.

He is cautious to predict what legislation might come in to affect it either way, “but I’d like to think we’ve got new audiences coming along who understand the dogs are being cared for in a way that’s appropriate and [that] they have a career outside of racing as well. All the stats are improving.”

The race isn’t run just yet. Dog days aren’t over. But as the lights go out on greyhound racing in another corner of Britain, it’s a stark warning. The hare is on the move.