Thomas Lord dug up his turf twice and carried it to new grounds
The most famous cricket ground on Earth is actually its founder's third attempt. When the rent rose, Thomas Lord lifted his grass and relaid it elsewhere; when Parliament routed the Regent's Canal through his outfield, he moved the turf again. The final site, opened in 1814, still slopes over eight feet across the pitch.
Lord was a bowler on the staff of the White Conduit Club, but he had a head for business, so the club sent him to find a private venue. With two aristocratic patrons, the Earl of Winchilsea and Colonel Charles Lennox, promising to cover any shortfall, he opened his first ground in Marylebone in May 1787, on land where Dorset Square now stands, and the club reinvented itself as Marylebone Cricket Club. A second field in St John's Wood lasted from 1811 to 1813 before canal diggers claimed it. The Eyre family offered a nearby plot, complete with a duck pond and that famous diagonal drop of 2.49 metres, so bowlers from the Pavilion End run downhill.
Records came early. In 1820 William Ward hit 278 for MCC against Norfolk, the first double hundred, and it stood as the highest score for 56 years until W. G. Grace made 344 in 1876. In 1825 a fire destroyed the pavilion and MCC's irreplaceable archives, and that same year Lord planned to cover the field with houses. Ward saved it by paying him £5,000, a rescue celebrated in an affectionate anonymous poem.
Oxford first played Cambridge there in 1827. Big crowds for school and university fixtures spilled onto the grass, which forced the introduction of boundaries in 1866 and turnstiles in 1871. Australia, led by Dave Gregory, stunned MCC by nine wickets in 1878, launching a rivalry, and Lord's staged its first Test during the 1884 Ashes. In 1899 Albert Trott struck a six clean over the pavilion, a feat nobody has matched as of 2026.
Today the ground belongs to MCC, is home to Middlesex and the England and Wales Cricket Board, holds 31,100 spectators and keeps the oldest sporting museum anywhere.
Source: Lord's
