St. James Park

The Freemen of Newcastle grazed cattle on this land before anyone marked out a pitch on it. Football arrived in 1880 with Newcastle Rangers. The ground grew outwards from a small stand at the Gallowgate End in the early 1890s — no architect is credited with the original work — and the site has been building over itself ever since.

The steepest growth came early. Capacity stood at 30,000 in 1899 and doubled by 1905 with the main stand on Barrack Road, the structure that became the Milburn Stand. Terracing went after the Taylor Report; the 1993–1995 rebuild, funded largely by Sir John Hall at a cost of around £14 million, brought the Leazes End stand that carries his name and left capacity at 36,610. The £42 million second-tier work of 1998–2000 pushed it back above fifty thousand.

Between November 2009 and October 2012 the ground carried another name entirely — Sports Direct Arena, applied by Mike Ashley to advertise that naming rights were for sale. Wonga declined to buy them, and St James' Park came back.

The pitch has been a SISGrass hybrid since 2019, five per cent synthetic. It has taken Olympic football in 2012, New Zealand against Tonga at the 2015 Rugby World Cup, and England's first rugby union test against Italy in 2019. An FA Cup final has never come here.