Lord’s calls itself the Home of Cricket and, unusually for a sporting slogan, the claim is defensible. The ground has stood on its St John’s Wood site since 1814, it is owned by the Marylebone Cricket Club that wrote the Laws of the game, and it houses the oldest sports museum in the world — including the Ashes urn itself.
What visitors notice first is that it is not flat. A pronounced slope runs diagonally across the field from the Grand Stand side down to the Tavern and Mound Stands, a drop of about 8 ft 2 in (2.49 m). Bowlers work downhill from the Pavilion End and uphill from the Nursery End, and MCC has repeatedly refused to level it. Lord’s ranks third on our list of the oldest stadiums in the world still in use.
Key Stats
| Opened | 1814 (third of Thomas Lord’s grounds; first match 22 June 1814) |
| Location | St John’s Wood, City of Westminster, London, England |
| Capacity | 31,100 |
| Tenants | Marylebone Cricket Club (1814–present); Middlesex CCC (1877–present); England and Wales Cricket Board |
| Sport | Cricket |
| First Test match | 21–23 July 1884, England v Australia |
| Slope | Approx. 8 ft 2 in (2.49 m) fall across the playing surface |
Three Grounds, One Set of Turf
Thomas Lord was a ground-staff bowler for the White Conduit Club who was picked, on the strength of his business sense, to find the club a private venue. Backed against loss by the Earl of Winchilsea and Colonel Charles Lennox, he opened his first ground in May 1787 on land leased from the Portman estate, where Dorset Square now stands. The club promptly reconstituted itself as Marylebone Cricket Club.
A rent rise pushed Lord to move in 1811 — and he took the turf with him, relaying it at a second site on the Eyre Estate. That ground lasted barely two years before Parliament routed the Regent’s Canal straight through the outfield. The Eyre family offered another plot about 250 yards north-west, and Lord dug up his turf a second time. The Tavern went up in 1813–14, a wooden pavilion followed, and MCC played Hertfordshire in the first match on the present ground on 22 June 1814.
That pavilion burned down on 28 July 1825, the night of the first Winchester v Harrow match, taking MCC’s records and archives with it. The current Pavilion — the ground’s third — was designed by Thomas Verity and built in 1889–90 for £21,000. It has been a Grade II* listed building since September 1982.
The Buildings
The Pavilion is Victorian brick with terracotta facing, gargoyles and pyramid-capped end towers, containing the Long Room and the players’ dressing rooms. Directly opposite it, 15 metres above ground on supports built around two lift shafts, sits the Media Centre: designed by Future Systems under Jan Kaplícký, built in 32 sections by a Falmouth shipyard, and the first all-aluminium semi-monocoque building in the world. It cost around £5 million, opened in April 1999, and won the RIBA Stirling Prize that year.
Between them are Sir Herbert Baker’s legacy and a century of rebuilding: the Grand Stand (Baker 1926, replaced by a Nicholas Grimshaw design in 1998), the Mound Stand (Michael Hopkins, 1987) and the Compton and Edrich Stands, whose 2021 redevelopment added 2,600 seats and took the ground to its current 31,100 capacity. Baker also gave MCC the Father Time weathervane — 6 ft 6 in tall, the figure alone 5 ft 4 in — showing Time removing the bails.
The Museum and the Records
The MCC Museum is the oldest sports museum in the world. MCC began collecting in 1864, opened the collection to the public as the Imperial Memorial Collection in 1953, and now draws around 50,000 visitors a year. The Ashes urn lives there, alongside kit used by Trumper, Hobbs, Bradman and Warne, and the stuffed sparrow killed by a Jahangir Khan delivery on 3 July 1936.
On the field, Lord’s hosted its first Test in July 1884 and its hundredth in June 2000. Albert Trott hit a six over the Pavilion in 1899 and, as of 2026, remains the only batsman to have done it. Graham Gooch made the ground’s first Test triple-century, 333 against India, in 1990.
FAQ
Why is Lord’s Cricket Ground called Lord’s?
After Thomas Lord, who founded it. He established three grounds between 1787 and 1814 and physically moved the turf from one to the next; the present ground in St John’s Wood is the third.
What is the slope at Lord’s?
The playing surface falls roughly 8 ft 2 in (2.49 m) diagonally from the Grand Stand side to the Tavern and Mound side. It gives seam and swing bowlers different advantages from each end, and MCC has resisted levelling it — doing so would mean rebuilding the ground and losing Test cricket for around five years.
Can the public visit Lord’s?
Yes. The MCC Museum and the ground are open to visitors on tour, and Lord’s stages Test matches, one-day internationals, Middlesex county fixtures and cup finals through the English season.
Photo: Yorkspotter via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)