Fulham fans once turned their backs on matches to watch the Boat Race
Craven Cottage sits right on the Thames in West London, so close that supporters standing on the old riverside terrace would turn their heads each year to watch the Oxford and Cambridge crews row past. The ground itself began as a lodge in woods that had once been Anne Boleyn's hunting grounds.
William Craven, the sixth Baron Craven, built the original cottage in 1780. Later residents included Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of The Last Days of Pompeii, before fire destroyed it in May 1888. When Fulham's representatives found the abandoned site in 1894 it was so overgrown that clearing it took two years. The club's first ticketed match there came in October 1896, watched from a wooden stand fans nicknamed the 'rabbit hutch'.
Safety worries from London County Council led to a court case in 1905 and a rebuild by Archibald Leitch, the Scottish architect behind Ibrox. His red-brick pavilion, the present-day Cottage, and the stand along Stevenage Road cost £15,000, a record then, and both are now Grade II listed. That stand was later renamed after Johnny Haynes, the former England captain and Fulham's favourite son, following his death in 2005.
Grand schemes kept failing. A director, Henry Norris, took over Arsenal in the 1910s hoping to merge the two clubs into a London superclub at the Cottage, and a 1933 plan for an 80,000-seat stadium died in the Depression. Instead, the ground drew 49,335 people for a match against Millwall in 1938, a record unlikely to fall now that it is all-seated. It hosted football at the 1948 Olympics, and on Boxing Day 1963 Graham Leggat scored a hat-trick in under three minutes as Fulham beat Ipswich 10–1.
Rules introduced after the Hillsborough disaster eventually forced Fulham out while redevelopment was debated, and the club spent a season and a half at Loftus Road, home of rivals QPR. Fans campaigned under the banner 'Back to the Cottage', and an £8 million refurbishment brought the team home for the 2004–05 season.
Source: Craven Cottage
