Ewood Park

Ewood Park has changed shape more than most grounds its age, and the reasons why say something about how the club's fortunes have moved. The site opened in 1882, when it was still open ground on the edge of a hamlet then called Ewood Bridge, and Blackburn Rovers have not left it since. The first real trace of ambition came at the turn of the century, when Archibald Leitch drew up the Nuttall Street Stand in 1904.

What followed was long stretches of neglect broken by sudden bursts of building. A 1960 Cup win paid for a concrete roof over the Blackburn End; a fire in 1984 forced the rebuilding of part of that same end. The turning point came after Bradford City's fire in 1985 tightened safety rules across English football — the old double-decker Riverside Stand came down and went up again as a single tier. None of it matched what happened in the 1990s, when Jack Walker's money took Ewood Park from a ground of open terraces to an all-seater arena built for the top flight: the Ronnie Clayton and Bryan Douglas ends opened in early 1994, the 11,000-seat Jack Walker Stand followed that August, and the whole rebuild was formally opened in November 1995.

The record crowd still belongs to an older Ewood Park — 61,783 packed in for an FA Cup sixth-round tie against Bolton Wanderers in March 1929. The ground has hosted an England fixture, FA Cup semi-finals across the first half of the twentieth century, and the wartime replay of the 1941 League War Cup final between Arsenal and Preston. In 2005 it staged matches, including the final, at the Women's Euros — one of the few times the ground's football history has looked outward rather than back at its own club.