Priestfield Stadium

The second stand at Priestfield was put up in 1899 by retired dockers, who were paid in beer and cigarettes. But so has any record of who designed the place to begin with: the club bought the land, laid out a pitch and built a pavilion, and the first matches were played on 2 September 1893, when the tenants were still called New Brompton.

The name settled slowly. It opened as the Athletic Ground, was known until 1947 as Priestfield Road after the street behind it, and only then became Priestfield Stadium. Sponsors have since attached prefixes to that — KRBS between 2007 and 2010, MEMS from 2011 to 2023 and again from 2024.

What an away supporter meets first is the Brian Moore Stand, the visitors' end, which opened in 2003 as a temporary structure with no roof and has stayed that way. The rest of the ground came together in the years either side of it: the Gordon Road Stand in 1997, the Rainham End behind the opposite goal in 1999, and the two-tier Medway Stand along the north side with its twenty boxes. The rebuilding after 1997 left the ground entirely seated.

The pitch was changed in September 2018, when the club moved to a hybrid surface of grass and plastic fibre and put in drainage and irrigation beneath it, at a cost of around £450,000.

The biggest crowd the ground has held came on 10 January 1948 — 23,002 for an FA Cup tie against Queens Park Rangers.