There are shopping centres, business parks and housing estates in Britain where cricket fans prone to nostalgia – are there any others? – may feel they can, with the breeze in the right direction, catch a scent of linseed oil and luncheon meat in Claire’s Accessories, or hear a distant barking of ‘Good areas, skip, good areas!’ wafting from across the trampolines and carports…
Places where the babble of the everyday seems likely to be ended prematurely by the spectral apparition of a man in a white coat removing the bails, with shoppers shooed, tutting, from B&Q, and squealing toddlers silenced as their paddling pools deflate.
Meandering through these emptying spaces at close of play, you may find yourself in elegiac mood, wondering wistfully, as the chattering herd wind slowly toward the car park, and the security man plods his weary way, how many mute inglorious Arthur Milton innings here may rest?
Outgrounds have a special place in the hearts of cricket lovers, the more so when not only abandoned by their county, but demolished and built over.
Flicking through the first Wisden I bought, as a spotty 14-year-old in 1975, I come across a diagram of Hastings Central Cricket Ground. Even though I never visited, it’s hard not to feel a pang of longing for the deckchair enclosures, the tiered free seating and the refreshment marquee.
The square – on which Ranji, George Hirst, Duleepsinhji and Ted Dexter struck double-hundreds, Australian medium-pacer Charles ‘The Terror’ Turner took 17 for 50 against an England XI in 1888, and Maurice Tate’s seamers wobbled in the sea breeze – is now buried beneath the Priory Meadow shopping centre.
Sussex v Lancashire at the Hastings Central Recreation Ground in 1985
Ted Dexter patrols the boundary for Sussex against Kent at Hastings
The Golden of Age of CB Fry and the Jam Sahib has made way for the Priory Meadow shopping centre
The Golden Age of CB Fry and the Jam Sahib has made way for the less glistering epoch of Poundland and Primark, though the presence of Specsavers will please terrace wits with a droll line in umpire gags.
If Hastings was a ramshackle, romantic relic of cricket’s gilded past, Harlow Sportcentre, in Essex, was a vision of our never-had-it-so-good future, a beacon for the promised Leisure Age which would see all Britons working 30-hour weeks, retiring at 50 and spending their time playing squash or hosting fondue parties.
This was the first purpose-built sports centre in Britain, and its changing-rooms were officially opened by FIFA president Sir Stanley Rous in 1960. A year later, the cricket facility hosted its opening match, a one-day game between sides captained by Doug Insole and Peter May.
In April 1970, the local press announced that the Sportcentre would host a cricket festival from June 27 to July 3. This would feature Essex playing a Pakistan Under 25s team, then a Championship match against Kent.
The proclamation was overegged. There was no touring team from Pakistan that summer, though cricket fans in Harlow did see Essex beating a Cambridge University side including a 23-year-old Majid Khan. The home spinners, David Acfield and Ray East, proved too much, even for Khan, as the students were dismissed for 47 in their second innings.
Amid carnival scenes provided by sponsors Harlow Development Corporation – they erected marquees with displays devoted to ‘gardens and horticulture’, ‘holidays and travel’, ‘sports equipment’ and ‘general’ – Kent arrived. Mike Denness stroked an unbeaten 167, lofty Norman Graham and bustling John Shepherd terrorised the home batsmen, and Kent won by an innings.
Harlow Sportcentre never hosted another first-class match, though Khan did return in 1981, when (aged 34) he hit a century for the long-expected Pakistan Under 25s against Essex 2nd XI (captained by Denness).
By 2010, a housing estate had been built on the site. A new facility, Harlow Leisurezone opened in its stead. It has a gym, swimming pool and spa, but no cricket pitch: the summer game’s place in the exercise regimen of the nation appropriated by aquarobics, Zumba and CrossFit trainers.
Harlow’s Sportcentre has been replaced by a Leisurezone – it has a gym, swimming pool and spa, but no cricket pitch
Hoffmann’s Sports and Social Club Ground in nearby Chelmsford has also been obliterated. The ground belonged to a ball-bearing factory on Rainsford Road, and staged a brace of Championship matches, with Essex losing to Lancashire in 1959 and drawing with Derbyshire in 1961.
A few days after that draw came the ground’s most exciting event, a first-class game between Essex and a strong South African development side called the Fezelas – Zulu for water scorpion – which included Eddie Barlow, Colin Bland and Peter Pollock.
The attendance was barely 500 over the three days, but those present on the last saw a feverish conclusion, as the tourists’ 21-year-old wicketkeeper, Dennis Lindsay, smashed five successive sixes off leg-spinner Bill Greensmith. (Only Arthur Wellard had previously hit five in a row, in 1936 and again in 1938.) In the late 1980s, the land was sold to a building company, the final residual crackle of Lindsay’s pyrotechnics embedded in concrete.
The Erinoid ground – named after a nearby plastics factory – in Stroud was in a natural bowl, surrounded by bucolic hills. One perimeter fence was a long line of ochre canvas, an extended beach windbreak a long way from the sea. It hosted 14 first-class matches between 1956 and 1963. The wooded hills have become housing estates, the disco that once overlooked the pitch long demolished, the cricket field – a happy hunting ground for Arthur Milton, whose 131 against Leicestershire in 1963 was the last first-class hundred made there – now a trading estate.
Leicestershire is home to three grounds later buried beneath brick and tarmac. The county played 17 Championship matches at Coventry Road, Hinckley, between 1951 and 1964, their last a damp squib – bundled out twice by Kent, with mighty John Dye (11 for 57) rampant. A leisure centre opened on the site in 1977, and was demolished in 2016, to the dismay of council-tax payers.
In 1965, the Foxes won their final county match at the fittingly named Brush Ground, Loughborough (owned by the Brush Electrical Machines Company): off-spinner John Savage, who took nine wickets, and Sri Lankan Clive Inman, who hit 125, were the heroes, as Middlesex were stuffed by 10 wickets.
The Town Ground in Coalville hosted just one first-class game, in 1950, Leicestershire crumpling to defeat by Warwickshire. The slow left-arm bowling of Abdul Kardar, grandfather of Pakistan cricket, proved decisive. Perhaps the new streets echo occasionally to the ghostly applause of local pitmen celebrating a boundary from bespectacled Charles Palmer, described by Trevor Bailey as ‘a natural for the role of hen-pecked bank clerk in a farce’. He struck 143 in a losing cause.
Southampton has lost two venues: the Antelope Ground and its successor, Northlands Road. It was at the Antelope (the name taken from a neighbouring hotel) that William Mycroft, a luxuriously moustachioed left-arm fast bowler with a controversial yorker, ran amok against Hampshire in 1876. A century and a half later, his figures of 17 for 103 (with 12 bowled) remain a Derbyshire record.
Len Hutton bats for Yorkshire at the Circle in Hull in 1955. The ground is now the home of Hull City and the Hull rugby league team
Whether or not he pinged the odd one, many believe fellow cricketer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle appropriated the name for Sherlock Holmes’s smarter brother. The scene of his heroics, though, lies beneath an NHS clinic.
Northlands Road, with its twin pavilions, witnessed many records. On three separate occasions it was the setting for a batter to reach 1,000 runs before the end of May (a feat achieved only nine times in all). Wally Hammond managed it in 1927, while Don Bradman did so in 1930 and 1938. And in 1996, Kevan James took four wickets in four balls against the touring Indians (his victims included Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid), and then cracked a century.
More surprisingly still, the ground played a part in a notorious 1947 greyhound racing scandal at the adjacent Southampton Stadium (the barking occasionally disturbed snoozing cricket supporters on warm evenings). Members of a doping gang used the Northlands Road scoreboard as a vantage point to monitor events on the track, where dogs were surreptitiously fed fishcakes laced with phenobarbitone. A housing estate covers the site of this infamy.
Newport’s Rodney Parade, with its refreshment tent and sturdy brick pavilion (the two tall chimneys suggesting chilly May mornings and September evenings), became a first-class ground in 1935, a year after Monmouthshire CCC had agreed to merge with Glamorgan. The first important visitors were Leicestershire, and a civic reception was held in the town hall.
More regular opponents were Gloucestershire who, on their third visit, in 1939, took part in a remarkable match. Glamorgan were dismissed for 196, before Hammond struck 302 in the visitors’ 505 for five declared. Undaunted, Emrys Davies hit back with an unbeaten 287 (the highest score for Glamorgan until the 21st century) to save the day. By the 1960s, crowds had dwindled, and the clash with Warwickshire in 1965 proved the last first-class game at Rodney Parade.
Championship cricket returned to Newport, however, in 2019, when Gloucestershire played Glamorgan at the town’s new ground, Spytty Park. By then, the council had built a primary school on Rodney Parade.
A more ignominious fate befell The Circle in Hull, which between 1899 and 1974 hosted 89 first-class matches. On warm summer days, the impressive pavilion – which looked like a grand pub designed by Edwin Lutyens – was besieged by battalions of deckchairs.
The pitch had less of an amiable holiday air. Soft and gripping, it was an ever-generous gift to Yorkshire’s string of slow left-armers. Hedley Verity took at least 12 first-class wickets at The Circle on three occasions, and Wilfred Rhodes twice, while Johnny Wardle’s 16 for 112 against Sussex in 1954 was a career-best. After Yorkshire stopped travelling to their most easterly outpost, the Circle fell into disrepair.
The Crabble Ground in Dover, Kent, whch hosted first-class matches from 1907 to 1976
The pavilion was condemned, then demolished in 1987. The last match was played there in 2000, and the MKM Stadium – home to Hull City and to Hull rugby league club – now stands on the site, a painful 25,586-seat reminder of the place cricket now holds in the sporting life of the nation, even in Yorkshire.
A similar point could be made about Bramall Lane, the only Test ground to have vanished, its once famous square absorbed by the stands of Sheffield United FC. In 1902, England met Australia here, and were trounced by 143 runs. They did not come back.
Many visiting players must have wished they could also stay away. Bramall Lane was notorious for the industrial smog which wreathed it like a murky muffler, and for its vociferous fans. During one encounter between Yorkshire and Middlesex in 1924, the umpires had to stop play while appeals were made for quiet – rarely in short supply at county matches nowadays. Whatever others thought, the Yorkshire players loved it.
After the final match in 1973 (a rain-soaked Roses draw), the square was sold off at 20p per square yard. Geoffrey Boycott bought the length of a batting strip to lay in his back garden.
Only rugby union is now played at Dover’s Crabble Ground, which began life as a first-class venue in 1907, when Kent were led out by their fair-haired Old Etonian skipper Cloudesley ‘Slug’ Marsham for a match with Gloucestershire.
The ground was a perfect oval, surrounded by an asphalt cycling track and, during Dover Cricket Week, a creamy encampment of canvas. The pitch had been laid by the great Kent slow bowler Alec Hearne. Perhaps he prepared a surface to his own liking, because Tich Freeman – the prolific leg-break bowler – claimed 12 or more wickets here on five occasions. Later Kent spinners Doug Wright and Derek Underwood each did so once.
If slow bowlers might have enjoyed the Crabble, the powers that be were less enthusiastic, and the pitch deteriorated in the 1970s. Crowds fell, too. The local council, who owned the field, were not prepared to spend rate-payers’ money on improvements. First-class cricket left; car-boot sales moved in.
Rugby union also overran Glamorgan’s original home at Cardiff Arms Park. It might have been different. Buoyed by being joint-winners of the 1900 Minor Counties Championship, Glamorgan made a bold bid to host a Test the following year.
Bramall Lane takes in a Roses clash in 1937. It is one of two grounds (along with the Oval) to have hosted an England football match, England cricket Test match and an FA Cup final
An England XI including Hutton (second left) and Wally Hammond (centre) take on an Australia Services team at Bramall Lane in 1945
MCC were impressed by the facilities, and the right to host the match became a battle between Cardiff and Nottingham. The committee awarded it to Trent Bridge by a single vote.
Test status might have preserved the ground, though in rugby-mad South Wales perhaps not. The pavilion was delightful – turreted, half-timbered and with roofs surmounted by bulb-shaped domes. The decision to pull it down in 1934 to make way for the North Stand of the rugby stadium was a sign of things to come.
The next pavilion was as exotic as a multistorey car park and, with the great dark back of the new stand overhanging the outfield like the shadow of doom, the general assessment of the Arms Park by visiting cricket journalists was ‘unprepossessing’.
Still, it had its moments. In 1935, Glamorgan hitter Cyril Smart came in at 10 for five against the visiting South Africans, and smashed a lightning century – including a massive six that brought up his hundred and disappeared through the plate glass window of a hotel in Westgate Street.
A month later, Smart became the first to belt 32 runs from a six-ball over, when he set about the Hampshire off-spinner Gerry Hill. More hostelry glass was shattered.
Tall blocks of flats were erected on Westgate Street, adding to the Arms Park cricket field’s sense of claustrophobia. In 1967, Glamorgan moved to Sophia Gardens, and for the next decade or so the Welsh national rugby ground sat athwart the strip like a triumphant bully – until it too was flattened to make way for the Millennium Stadium.
In 2025, another familiar Welsh ground joined the legion of the fallen. They include Elm Avenue (Newark), Clarence Park (Weston-super-Mare), Tipton Road (Dudley), Snibston Colliery Ground (Coalville), Dean Park (Bournemouth), Fartown (Huddersfield) – and now St Helen’s. It means Swansea becomes the latest addition to the roll call of towns and cities to have lost first-class cricket.
On August 31, having hosted two one-day internationals and 418 first-class matches, it bade farewell to cricket, not with a bang but a whimper: Swansea 2nds lost to Pontardawe by six wickets, ending 152 years of cricket at St Helen’s. Welsh rugby union club Ospreys will make it their home, though they have existential problems of their own.
The Dean Park Sports Ground in the 1930s, with Bournemouth station visible at the top of the picture
Alan Jones, who holds the record for the most first-class runs (36,049) without playing in an official Test, hits out at Swansea’s St Helen’s ground for Glamorgan in 1979
Whatever happens in the 8,000-capacity ground, it’s unlikely anything will match those glorious five minutes exactly 57 years earlier, when Garry Sobers struck six sixes in an over off Malcolm Nash, using a bat which, in the grainy black and white television footage, appears so small he might have bought it in a Mumbles toyshop, along with a bucket and spade.
Even now, in quiet moments in the streets around the ground, you may think you can hear Nash’s anguished cry as he watches Roger Davis catch the fifth of Sobers’s blows, then fall across the boundary – though it is probably only the keening of a herring gull.
Harry Pearson has twice won the MCC/Cricket Society Book of the Year, and bitterly laments the demise of Harrogate’s Tilcon Trophy.
This article is an extract from Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2026, which is available to order now in hardback, paperback and Ebook (The Shorter Wisden 2026)
