The BBC Test Match Special commentary box on the upper tier of the Media Centre, home of an institution within an institution.
It is highly likely that Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the celebrated historian of English architecture, was not especially interested in cricket; he described Lord’s, long acknowledged as the game’s spiritual home, as ‘a jumble without aesthetic aspirations’. Were Pevsner alive today he would certainly revise that view, for in the late twentieth century the ground was redeveloped with a series of distinctive buildings that now circle the playing surface like a jewelled necklace.
The BBC Test Match Special commentary box on the upper tier of the Media Centre, home of an institution within an institution.
In Pevsner’s day the only building of note was the Pavilion, built in the High Victorian style so deeply distrusted by Modernists. Lord’s itself dates from 1814, being the third cricket ground established by the eponymous Thomas Lord in the vicinity of St John’s Wood as home to the Marylebone Cricket Club – then, as now, the guardians of the sport. By the late nineteenth century the MCC required a new pavilion and commissioned the architect Thomas Verity, who in 1871 had played a key role in the design of the Royal Albert Hall, where the distinctive terracotta facings clearly anticipate those at Lord’s. The building opened in 1891, at a cost of £21,000, and was restored in 2005. In the words of a contemporary account, Verity provided ‘a large saloon, offices, dressing and bath rooms, canteen, retiring room and accommodation for 2,000 on terrace, balcony and roofs’. But he also provided so much more, for this is the building that confirmed the MCC’s position, in the words of one nineteenth-century commentator, as ‘perhaps the most revered institution in the British Empire’.
The home team dressing room, overlooked by honours board denoting Test Match century scorers and leading wicket takers.
The Lord’s Pavilion is a cross between a country house and a luxurious gentleman’s club. The building’s central Long Room (or saloon, as it was described in 1891) brings together both members and the players, who must pass through it on their way to and from the pitch. The dressing rooms are located beyond the Long Room and up a grand staircase, and along this rather tortuous route the disappointed, or exultant, cricketer will come into contact with many rather more relaxed MCC members. There are around 18,000 men, and rather fewer women, entitled to wear MCC colours, and the twenty-year waiting list eventually gives access to other myriad facilities at Lord’s, from the elegant dining and writing rooms in the Pavilion to one of the few real tennis courts in the country.
The away team showers.
The splendid gentlemen’s lavatories in the pavilion basement.
The past is always present at Lord’s. The MCC maintains a museum, the centrepiece of which is the tiny Ashes urn, the prize contested by England and Australia since 1882. W.G. Grace, a titan of the nineteenth-century game, is commemorated by the Grace Gates outside the ground. A short distance from these gates is a striking relief sculpture from 1934, showing a procession of thirteen sportsmen and women, above whose heads is the Victorian admonition: ‘Play Up, Play Up and Play the Game’.
In 1987 the MCC belied its hidebound reputation with the construction of the Mound Stand, a building so accomplished, light and graceful that it caused the Architects’ Journal to speculate that ‘post-war UK architecture may come to be labelled either pre- or post-Lord’s, for the new stand can well be seen as the point at which the warring factions of modernism and conservation evaporated’. The architects, Michael Hopkins and Partners, roofed the stand with tent-like cones to produce a motif that has been replicated at sporting arenas around the world. The cones are supported by a slim steel structure that in turn rests on more powerful brick arches retained from the stand’s predecessor. Where new arches had to be constructed the architects specified second-hand bricks, so it is impossible to distinguish new from old.
In 1999 the MCC came up with something still more remarkable. This was the new Media Centre, by the architects Future Systems, which stares over Lord’s like the lens of a giant camera. The building was fabricated from aluminium in a Cornish boatyard and re-erected in St John’s Wood. It won the Stirling Prize for contemporary architecture and the tiered desks, stretched across its vibrant blue interior, provide a sensational view of the action below. However, cricket journalists grumble that its principal designer, the Czech-born Jan Kaplický, understood little of their game, as only one tiny window in the building opens, thus sealing the interior from the sound and atmosphere of the drama outside.
Much has changed since Pevsner made his disparaging comments, but one small feature remains from the days of Thomas Lord himself. This is a slope across the playing surface, which drops fully 6 ft 8 in (1.8 m) from one corner to the other. There is no other major sporting venue in the world where such an anomaly survives.
Most of the systems for maintaining the hallowed turf are conventional machines, as seen in the mower shed.