Thomas Lord Opens His Middle Ground — St John's Wood, May 1809

Thomas Lord had been the founder, owner and groundsman of the Dorset Fields ground since 1787. By the late 1800s the ground was MCC's home and the centre of metropolitan cricket. Lord's anxiety about the lease was justified — the Portman family had no intention of giving the cricketers favourable terms when London's expansion was making Marylebone land valuable.

Lord secured the Eyre lease in 1804 as insurance against the Portman expiry. He spent the winter of 1808-09 levelling, returfing and fencing the new site. He almost certainly hoped that MCC would relocate immediately, but the club was attached to Dorset Square and resisted.

Thomas Lord had opened his first ground at Dorset Fields in May 1787, on land leased from the Portman estate. By 1808 the Portman family, sensing the increasing value of land in Marylebone, indicated their intention to raise the rent significantly when the lease expired in 1810. Lord, who in 1804 had taken out an eighty-year lease on the Brick and Great Fields at North Bank in St John's Wood from the Eyre family, prepared the new ground through 1808 and opened it in time for the 1809 season. The Middle Ground was small, sloping and unprepossessing — a 'three acres of unevenness' according to one MCC member. Most damagingly, the MCC declined to relocate; the club continued to play its Lord's matches at Dorset Square. The St John's Wood Cricket Club used the Middle Ground regularly. Only three MCC matches are recorded as having been played there, all in 1813. In June 1813 Parliament's Act for the construction of the Regent's Canal cut directly through the site, and Lord was forced to move again. He persuaded the Eyre Estate to lease him a third parcel — half a mile north — and moved the turf, opening the present Lord's Cricket Ground in 1814 with an MCC v Hertfordshire match. The Middle Ground's brief and unloved tenure, 1809-13, is the lost middle chapter of Lord's history.

“Mr Lord, having lost his old ground, has formed a new one in St John's Wood, distant rather more than a mile from his late one.”

The Middle Ground was abandoned without ceremony in 1813 and the canal cut through the site in 1815-16. Thomas Lord himself recovered financially from the move, opened the present ground in 1814, and remained groundsman until selling the lease to William Ward in 1825. The Eyre family kept the freehold of the present Lord's ground and still own it today.