Lord's Cricket Ground

Lord’s Cricket Ground has called St John’s Wood home since Thomas Lord founded the club in 1787, which was bloody ages ago. And before the self-proclaimed ‘home of cricket’ settled on its current site in 1814, the grounds had three upheavals to venues in the area that no longer exist.

Nowadays, 200-odd years on, Lord’s continues to inspire a sentimental nostalgia in fans and players alike. Former England international cricketer Andrew Flintoff declared that ‘there's nowhere on earth like it’, while playwright Harold Pinter felt moved to proclaim the club’s Long Room ‘the greatest room in the world’. You can decide for yourself if you take a tour of Lord’s, which will lead you into said Long Room (a museum housing battered bats, photos, blazers and the Ashes urn), as well as the JP Morgan Media Centre – an ultramodern raised pod that affords VIP views.

A good little nugget of info about Lord’s is that during the 2012 Olympic Games, this splendid setting was made good use of to showcase a sport of even longer pedigree: archery.