City Ground

Nottingham Forest have played on the south bank of the Trent since September 1898. The club had already used the name once before, on the Town Ground upriver, before redevelopment pushed them out and they carried it with them to the new site.

The Brian Clough Stand went up in 1980, paid for out of what Forest had just won in Europe — back-to-back European Cups in 1979 and 1980 funded a two-tier stand that still carries the manager's name. The Bridgford Stand took its curved roofline from a more ordinary constraint: the houses behind it needed their daylight, so the design bends around them rather than blocking it. The Trent End came last, torn down and rebuilt between 1994 and 1996 to be ready for that summer's European Championship, and it was this phase that fixed the ground at roughly its present size.

None of that reconstruction has matched what the terraces once held. On an October night in 1967, with Manchester United as opponents, the City Ground took in just short of 50,000 for a First Division fixture — Forest won it 3-1.

Underfoot the change is more recent.

The land itself still belongs to Nottingham City Council rather than the club, an arrangement that came under scrutiny after Evangelos Marinakis took ownership in 2017 and began weighing an expansion that would push capacity well beyond its current level.