The Oval

The Oval is on the Kennington side of the Thames, the oldest of the venues England still uses for a Test match. Surrey County Cricket Club took the lease from the Duchy of Cornwall in 1845, the same year the ground opened, and has called it home in every season since.

The pitch itself has an odd founding detail worth keeping: the outfield was laid using turf cut in ten thousand pieces from Tooting Common, carted across south London to give the new ground a playing surface from its first year. That surface remains natural grass, as any Surrey member would expect.

Capacity has crept up rather than jumped. For most of its modern history The Oval held around 18,500, a figure that stayed largely fixed until the Vauxhall End was rebuilt and pushed the number to 23,000. A further 1,600 seats added not long after took it to 25,000, and the ground now holds 27,500 — a slow, stand-by-stand expansion rather than a single redevelopment.

Crowd figures from the ground's early decades survive only in fragments: 20,000 were reported inside for a match in 1868, well above what the ground was ever formally rated to hold at the time, a reminder that Victorian attendance counts and official capacity were two different things.