County Cricket Outgrounds and Festival Weeks

Most County Championship cricket is played at eighteen headquarters grounds with permanent stands, media boxes, indoor schools and floodlight pylons. For a few weeks each summer, some of it is played somewhere else entirely: on a school field in the Cotswolds, in a Victorian municipal park in north Derbyshire, in a walled amphitheatre inside a private estate in West Sussex, and in front of a seaside terrace in Scarborough where the deckchairs are as much a fixture as the scoreboard.

These are the outgrounds. The word is dull and the practice is not. An outground is any venue a county uses that is not its permanent base, and the fixtures played there are usually bundled into a festival week — a run of matches over several days, with temporary seating, marquees, a beer tent and a crowd that includes a large number of people who do not otherwise watch four-day cricket.

The list of outgrounds still in regular use is much shorter than it was in 1975, and each survivor has a different reason for surviving. Some make money. Some are written into a lease. Some exist because a school or a club owns a square that is genuinely better than anything the county could build. What follows is what happens at the main ones, and why the fixture list keeps shrinking.

What separates an outground from an out-of-town ground

Not every match away from a county headquarters is festival cricket. Counties have shifted matches for pitch relaying, for stadium construction and for the simple reason that a Test match was booked in the same week. Those are logistics.

A festival outground has three features. It is used repeatedly, often annually, so a local audience learns the dates. The county sells it as an occasion rather than a fixture. And the ground itself is small enough that the crowd sits close to the boundary, which changes the sound of the cricket more than people expect — you can hear the fielders, and the players can hear you.

That intimacy is the selling point, and it is also the operational problem. A ground with no permanent stands needs scaffold seating trucked in and taken away again. A club square used by league sides for three months needs a professional-standard strip prepared under the eye of a county groundsman. None of that is free. The County Championship is not a competition with money to spare, so every festival has to justify itself against the cost of simply playing at home.

Cheltenham College: the oldest fortnight in the game

Gloucestershire have played at the College Ground on Bath Road since 1872, which makes Cheltenham the longest continuously running cricket festival held on an outground anywhere. The club markets its supporters' scheme as the 1872 Club for that reason.

The mechanics are unusual. The ground belongs to Cheltenham College, so the festival can only happen in the school holidays, which fixes it in the second half of the summer. The county arrives, temporary stands go up around a square that spends the rest of the year serving school cricket, and the capacity lifts to roughly four thousand. In 2026 the festival ran across a fortnight in August and carried five matches in two formats, including a Championship game against Worcestershire and fixtures for Gloucestershire's women's side as well as the men.

The best-known cricket played there is Walter Hammond's. Against Surrey at Cheltenham in 1928 he made 139 and 143, and took four catches in the first innings and six in the second — ten in the match, which remains the first-class record. He finished that summer with seventy-eight catches, also a record that has stood. It is a reminder that festival cricket has never been an exhibition; the points counted then and they count now.

Scarborough, and the end of the Yorkshire season

Cricket has been played on the North Marine Road field since 1863, and the Scarborough Festival dates from 1876, when the town's cricket programme was extended into a nine-day event. It is the largest outground in the country by some distance. Safety limits put the modern capacity at around nine thousand; the record attendance is 22,946, set when Yorkshire played Derbyshire there in 1947, at a time when standing room was counted differently.

Scarborough sits at the end of the season rather than the middle of it, which gives it a specific character. Championship positions are usually settled or nearly settled, the light goes earlier, and the crowd is a mix of members who have followed the county all summer and holidaymakers who have walked up from the beach. The terraced houses behind one end give the ground its recognisable outline in photographs.

The relationship between Yorkshire and Scarborough Cricket Club is a landlord-and-tenant arrangement rather than ownership, and it has survived every reorganisation of English domestic cricket, including the arrival of the Hundred and the compression of the four-day calendar around it.

Queen's Park, Chesterfield

Queen's Park was laid out for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887. The cricket pitch inside it was constructed in 1893 and 1894 and inaugurated in May 1894; the pavilion followed in 1898. What you get is a first-class square inside a working municipal park, with a boating lake, a bandstand and a miniature railway in the other corners and mature trees ringing the outfield.

Derbyshire played there for the best part of a century, dropped it, and brought it back in the mid-2000s. The festival now sits at the turn of July into August. Photographs of Chesterfield show up in every list of the prettiest grounds in England, and the reason is structural: because the park was designed as a park, nothing has ever been built tight against the boundary.

The Nevill Ground and Kent's rhododendron week

Tunbridge Wells is the outground with the most improbable single day in its history. The land was bought in 1895 by the local cricket, football and athletic club on a long lease from the Marquess of Abergavenny, whose Eridge Park estate it had been part of, and the ground was named after William Nevill, the first Marquess. It opened in 1898. Kent first played there in 1901 and the cricket week has run since 1902. The rhododendrons planted in the ground's early years flower in June, which is why Kent's week is scheduled then and why television directors point a camera at the bank rather than the pitch between overs. In 1913 suffragettes burned the pavilion down.

Then, in June 1983, the Nevill staged a single World Cup group match between India and Zimbabwe. India were 17 for 5. Kapil Dev, the captain, made 175 not out from 138 balls with sixteen fours and six sixes, adding an unbroken 126 for the ninth wicket with Syed Kirmani to reach 266 for 8, and India won by 31 runs and went on to win the tournament at Lord's. A broadcast strike meant no television film of the innings exists. A club ground in Kent holds the most famous unseen innings in one-day cricket.

Arundel Castle, and the country-house line

Arundel is the one outground that is not really a club ground at all. The 15th Duke of Norfolk built a three-and-a-half acre ground inside the castle park in 1895, sunk into a natural bowl; the first match on it was played in 1897 between a Castle Works side and a local newspaper eleven. The 16th Duke used it from the 1930s to the 1970s for invitation matches that sat somewhere between country-house cricket and the first-class game, including the traditional fixture against touring international sides.

After his death, Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk, kept the cricket going, and the Friends of Arundel Castle Cricket Club was formed in 1975 to run it. Sussex began using the ground for limited-overs county matches in 1972 and played their first County Championship fixture there in 1990, against Hampshire, which was drawn.

Arundel matters historically because it preserves a form of the game — the private ground, the patron, the tourists' warm-up match — that has otherwise disappeared. It is a very different lineage from the one that runs through the history of Lord's, and worth understanding on its own terms.

Colwyn Bay and the argument about Welsh cricket

Glamorgan's outground at Penrhyn Avenue in Rhos-on-Sea is the only one that carries a political question. The club was founded in 1924 and first hosted Glamorgan in 1966, for a Championship match against Derbyshire that drew a crowd of more than four thousand; Wilf Wooller's advocacy was what got county cricket there.

The county then dropped the venue in 1974, restored it in 1990, dropped it again as the operation consolidated in Cardiff, and returned in 2019 for a Championship match against Lancashire. Each cycle turned on the same tension. Glamorgan represents the whole of Wales but its ground, its offices and its international fixtures are all in the south-east corner of the country, and north Wales is a four-hour drive away. Colwyn Bay is the county's answer to that, and it is an expensive answer, which is why it keeps lapsing.

Sedbergh, Radlett and the school-ground revival

The trend is not entirely one way. Lancashire took a Championship match to Sedbergh School in Cumbria in 2019, their first new outground in more than three decades, alongside their long-standing use of Liverpool's Aigburth ground. Middlesex, who have no ground of their own and rent Lord's, have used the Brunton Memorial Ground at Radlett in Hertfordshire since 2013, and have also played at Merchant Taylors' School in Northwood.

The logic behind school grounds is straightforward. A good independent school already has a large, well-drained square, a pavilion, parking and staff. The county supplies covers, seating and officials for a week. Nobody has to build anything permanent. For Middlesex in particular, an outground is also a way of playing in front of an audience that would never travel to St John's Wood on a Tuesday.

Southport's Trafalgar Road ground at Birkdale shows what these venues can produce. In 1982 Warwickshire made 523 for 4 declared there and Lancashire replied with 414 for 6 declared; Warwickshire were then bowled out for 111 and Lancashire knocked off the target without losing a wicket, winning by ten wickets after conceding a first-innings lead of well over a hundred. Small grounds and true squares produce that kind of match more often than big ones do.

Why the list keeps getting shorter

The economics are the whole story. Championship attendances outside a handful of fixtures are modest, and a festival week has real marginal costs — hired seating, temporary catering, hospitality structures, additional insurance, weeks of square preparation and a groundstaff detachment away from home. Set against that, playing at headquarters costs almost nothing extra, because the stands and the bars are already standing.

At the same time, counties have been pushed to invest in their main grounds, whether to bid for England internationals, to host Vitality Blast crowds under lights, or simply to run conferences and weddings for eleven months of the year. Money spent on a pylon at the county ground is money not spent on a marquee at a festival. Broadcast and streaming requirements pull the same way: a permanent camera position is easier than a temporary one.

Where outgrounds have survived, it is usually because they pay. Cheltenham and Scarborough draw crowds large enough to make the week profitable rather than sentimental. The ones that lapse are the ones that only ever broke even.

There is a counter-argument, made most often by supporters and by the counties' own commercial staff. Festival cricket reaches people who never attend at headquarters, it generates goodwill in parts of a county that otherwise see nothing, and it produces the images that sell the domestic game to anyone who has not watched it. Both positions are honest. The resolution, in practice, is that most counties now run one festival rather than three.

Going to a festival match

Practical differences from a headquarters day are worth knowing. Seating is often unreserved, and at some grounds a folding chair on a grass bank is the best seat available. Cash-only bars and queues at a single food van are still a possibility. Access is by road and local bus more often than by rail. Play can start earlier and finish later than the advertised times if the umpires are chasing overs in good light.

The cricket itself sometimes differs too. A club square that has taken league cricket all season can offer more sideways movement early, and outfields cut by a school or municipal groundstaff are frequently slower than a county's own. If you want to know what to look for in the strip before play, the guide to pitch types and what they do covers the basics.

Fixtures for these weeks are published with the rest of the season, usually months ahead, and festival matches tend to sell more of their hospitality than their general admission. For the wider picture of which grounds host what, see the guide to English cricket grounds and the Championship venue rundown. Broadcast and streaming arrangements are covered in how to watch county cricket, women's fixtures increasingly share these festival weeks and are set out in the guide to women's domestic cricket in England, and the rest of the English game sits on the cricket in England hub.

Sources and method

This guide draws on county club and festival organisers' published material for dates, formats and ground ownership — Gloucestershire's own festival history for Cheltenham, Kent's for Tunbridge Wells, and the Friends of Arundel Castle Cricket Club for Arundel — together with long-established first-class records for the individual performances described. Ground establishment dates and the Victorian park and estate history behind Chesterfield and Tunbridge Wells come from heritage records for those sites. Capacities at temporary-seating venues change year to year with the seating plan and safety certificate, so they are given as approximations. Nothing here is computed from our own datasets; the statistical claims are drawn from published first-class scorecards and records.