Cricket Festival Weeks in England: A History

In 1894, W. G. Grace scored his 98th first-class century at a ground in the middle of Hastings. Jack Hobbs made 266 there in 1925, which was his fifteenth hundred of that season and a record at the time. Denis Compton broke the record on the same ground in 1947. Don Bradman made his 115th century there in 1948. In 1902, Sussex declared on 705 for eight against Surrey at the same venue, with Ranjitsinhji making a double hundred.

That ground is now a shopping centre. It was demolished across 1996 and 1997 and replaced by Priory Meadow, which has a cricket-themed sculpture in it to acknowledge that something happened on the site for a hundred and thirty years.

The Hastings Festival is the clearest single illustration of what happened to English festival cricket. It ran from 1887 into the 1960s, was described in its prime as the southern equivalent of Scarborough, staged seven Gentlemen v Players matches between 1889 and 1903, and does not exist. Understanding why requires understanding what a festival week actually was, which is not the same thing as a county playing away from headquarters.

Canterbury, 1842

The oldest surviving cricket festival week in England is at Canterbury, and it began in 1842. A predecessor event had been staged in 1839 by the Beverley Cricket Club, which predated Kent County Cricket Club itself. The week was first held at the Beverley Ground and moved to the St Lawrence Ground in 1847, where it remains.

Its form was set almost immediately and has barely changed: consecutive Kent home matches, played in the first week of August, surrounded by a programme of events that had nothing to do with cricket. The Old Stagers, an amateur theatrical company, were formed specifically to perform at the festival and are still attached to it — which makes them, plausibly, the oldest amateur dramatic society in the world with a continuous purpose. By 2018 the week had been staged 167 times.

The other elements accreted over the decades. There was a Ladies Day with a hat competition, discontinued in recent years as social attitudes changed. The Kent Supporters Club still lays wreaths each year for the county's players who died in the two World Wars. Kent's highest attendance at the ground comes during the week.

The point to take from Canterbury is that a festival was an occasion first and a fixture second. The cricket was the reason people came; the theatricals, the marquees, the band and the wreath-laying were what made it a week rather than three matches.

What a festival week actually was

The Victorian and Edwardian festival was a specific social institution and it is worth describing plainly, because the modern version preserves the form without the function.

A county turned up at a town for a week, usually in high summer or at the end of the season, and played two or three matches consecutively. Tented enclosures were erected around the boundary for clubs, regiments, hunts and local societies. Members' marquees were pitched. A band played between sessions. Local businesses closed early or arranged half-days. Hotels filled. Trains were scheduled for it.

The cricket was often not championship cricket in any meaningful competitive sense. Festivals were where invitational sides played: an individual's XI, a Gentlemen of England side, an MCC team, a touring party filling a gap in its itinerary. The results frequently mattered less than the fact of a good crowd watching good players in pleasant surroundings.

This is the aspect hardest to reconstruct from a modern standpoint. English cricket for most of its history was not organised primarily as a competition. It was organised as a season of occasions, of which some happened to be part of a championship, and the festival week was the purest expression of that arrangement.

Scarborough, and cricket as a seaside attraction

The great northern festival grew out of tourism rather than out of a county's fixture list.

Cricket had been played at Castle Hill in Scarborough since 1849, and in 1863 the club took the tenancy of Jackson's field on North Marine Road, where the ground still is. Yorkshire first played there in 1878, and the first County Championship match on the ground came in 1896, when Yorkshire beat Leicestershire by 162 runs.

The festival itself developed at the end of the season, deliberately timed to catch the seaside trade. Scarborough was a resort; September brought visitors; the festival gave them something to do and gave the club a large paying crowd at a time of year when county cricket ordinarily played to empty grounds. It featured a mixture of touring teams, county sides and Yorkshire, in a combination of friendly, championship and one-day cricket, and for a long period it was the most reliably well-attended cricket week in the country. The ground's record attendance, 22,946, was set at a Yorkshire against Derbyshire match in 1947.

Scarborough also proved unusually adaptable. When the game moved towards limited-overs cricket, the festival absorbed it: the Fenner Trophy, a four-team one-day competition under a succession of sponsors, ran there from 1971 to 1996. The ground has staged one-day internationals — England against West Indies in 1976 and against New Zealand in 1978, with Viv Richards making the only one-day international century there, 119 not out — and women's Tests and one-day internationals.

It survives, and it survives because it was never dependent on a social season that ended. It was dependent on holidaymakers, and holidaymakers still come.

Gentlemen against Players, and the end of the amateur

The fixture that gave festival cricket much of its status was Gentlemen v Players, which began in July 1806 and ran for 157 years. It was the most time-honoured representative match in the English game, contested between amateurs — middle and upper class, unpaid — and professionals, overwhelmingly working class and paid. Two hundred and seventy-four matches were played. The Players won 125, the Gentlemen 68, eighty were drawn and one, in 1883, was tied.

Lord's staged it most often, with The Oval and Scarborough also regular venues. Hastings had it seven times between 1889 and 1903.

It was abolished in January 1963, when the MCC removed the distinction between amateur and professional cricketers and the fixture's entire premise disappeared with it. The final match had been played at North Marine Road, Scarborough, from 8 to 11 September 1962.

That date is the hinge of this whole subject. Festival cricket had been built on a structure in which amateurs of independent means could take a week off in August to play, in which representative fixtures organised on class lines were the pinnacle of the domestic season, and in which the county championship was one strand of a summer rather than the whole of it. All three of those conditions ended within about fifteen years of the war, and the festival week lost its reason for existing at roughly the same moment it lost its most prestigious match.

Cheltenham, 1872: the college model

The other durable survivor took a different form. Gloucestershire first played at the College Ground inside Cheltenham College in 1872, and the county's festival there has run, with interruptions, ever since. It is the longest-standing festival held on a school ground.

The arrangement solved a problem that killed festivals elsewhere. A public school has a large, well-drained playing field, permanent buildings, changing facilities and a groundstaff, and it is empty for the summer holidays. A county that plays there is not building a temporary ground from nothing; it is borrowing a functioning one for a fortnight. The modern Cheltenham festival adds charity events and off-field entertainment to the cricket, which is a continuation of the Canterbury principle rather than a departure from it.

The ground-by-ground picture of which festival venues remain in use, and what they are like to visit, is set out in the guide to county outgrounds and festival weeks.

What actually killed them

The decline of festival cricket is usually attributed to television or to Twenty20, and both are too simple. Several unrelated pressures arrived at once.

The end of amateurism. Covered above, and the largest single factor. Once every player was a professional employee, a county's fixture list became a schedule of work rather than a season of occasions, and the invitational matches that filled festival weeks lost both their players and their point.

Pitch and facility standards. As professional cricket became more valuable, the standards required of a first-class surface and of the facilities around it rose steadily. A club ground that could stage a county match in 1930 with a marquee and a tin bath could not do so in 1990. Preparing a square to first-class standard for two matches a year is expensive and the results are unpredictable — which matters more now that a bad pitch can cost a county championship points, a mechanism explained in the guide to County Championship bonus points.

The economics of the home ground. Counties spent the late twentieth century investing heavily in their headquarters — floodlights, permanent seating, hospitality boxes, conference facilities. Once a county has built all that, playing away from it for two weeks a summer means taking the cricket away from the revenue.

Property values. The Hastings case is the clearest. Planning permission for redevelopment of the Central Recreation Ground was granted in 1988. Sussex had played 143 first-class and 17 List A matches there across 124 years. A town-centre site of that size in the south of England is worth a great deal more as retail than as a cricket ground, and the arithmetic was never going to favour the cricket.

The compressed calendar. The modern season is a scheduling problem before it is anything else, with four men's competitions and an international programme to accommodate, and festival weeks require blocks of consecutive days at a single venue — the least flexible thing a fixture list can be asked to provide. The pressures involved are described in the guide to English domestic cricket structure.

Weather, and the risk nobody mentions

There is one further factor specific to England. A festival is a fixed commitment: a marquee hired, a ground prepared, staff engaged, and a town's businesses planning around dates set the previous winter. If it rains for four days, the county has spent the money and taken almost nothing.

At a permanent headquarters, a washout costs a county gate receipts. At an outground it costs gate receipts plus every pound spent putting the ground together. The arrangements that govern what happens when the weather intervenes are set out in the guide to rain, bad light and English playing conditions, and the seasonal patterns that make late-summer festival weeks a slightly better bet than early-season ones are covered in the guide to pitch conditions by season.

What festival cricket is now

The surviving weeks are real and they are well attended. Canterbury still stages its week in the first days of August with the Old Stagers attached. Scarborough still fills for Yorkshire in the second half of the season. Cheltenham still borrows its college ground. Several counties have revived festival cricket on school grounds on the Cheltenham model, which is the only model that currently makes financial sense.

What has changed is the nature of the cricket. A modern festival week is championship or one-day cup cricket relocated, not a programme of invitational matches; the fifty-over competition described in the guide to the One-Day Cup supplies the bulk of festival fixtures now, because it is the competition scheduled in the weeks when school grounds are free and headquarters are committed elsewhere. The tented enclosures for regiments and hunts are gone. The band, mostly, is gone.

What remains is the thing that made festivals worth having in the first place: a professional match played on a ground small enough that the spectators are close to it, in a place people have travelled to for the day rather than come to out of habit. That is a rarer experience in modern professional sport than it was, which is presumably why the surviving festivals are more popular now than the county cricket around them. For the grounds themselves see the English cricket grounds guide and the guide to how to watch county cricket; for the rest of the English game, the cricket in England hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on published histories and records of the individual festivals and grounds concerned: Canterbury Cricket Week from its 1842 foundation and the 1839 Beverley predecessor, the North Marine Road ground at Scarborough from 1863 and its festival, the Central Recreation Ground at Hastings across its 1864-1996 life and the 1887 origin of its festival, and the College Ground at Cheltenham from 1872. Individual performances at Hastings, the 1947 Scarborough attendance record and the Fenner Trophy dates are as recorded in those ground histories. The Gentlemen v Players record, its 1806 start, its abolition in January 1963 and the final match at Scarborough in September 1962 follow the published record of the fixture. The explanations offered for the decline are historical argument rather than measured findings, and no figures above were generated by our own statistical work.