County Cricket Teams in England: Complete Club Guide

There are eighteen of them, they have not changed since 1992, and between them they cover England from the Tyne to the Solent plus the whole of Wales. This county cricket teams England guide sets out every first-class club in one place — where it plays, which city it plays in, which railway station you get off at, and what it has actually won — and then explains what each part of the country's cricket is like to watch, because a Tuesday at Grace Road and a Tuesday at The Oval are not the same afternoon in any meaningful sense.

Start with the table. Everything after it is context.

All 18 first-class counties: grounds, cities, stations and honours

Ground names below are given in their cricketing form. Almost every county sells the naming rights to its headquarters, so the name on the signage changes with the sponsor while the ground does not — Somerset's is the Cooper Associates County Ground, Sussex's is the 1st Central County Ground, Durham's is the Seat Unique Riverside, and so on. Championship titles include those shared in the years before outright deciders existed.

County	Home ground	City or town	Nearest station	Championship titles
Derbyshire	County Ground	Derby	Derby (bus or 25-min walk)	1
Durham	Riverside	Chester-le-Street, Co Durham	Chester-le-Street (10-min walk)	3
Essex	County Ground	Chelmsford	Chelmsford (10-min walk)	8
Glamorgan	Sophia Gardens	Cardiff	Cardiff Central (20-min walk)	3
Gloucestershire	Bristol County Ground	Bristol	Montpelier or Redland (15-min walk)	0
Hampshire	The Utilita Bowl	West End, Southampton	Southampton Airport Parkway (shuttle)	2
Kent	St Lawrence Ground	Canterbury	Canterbury East (20-min walk)	7
Lancashire	Old Trafford	Manchester	Old Trafford (Metrolink)	9
Leicestershire	Grace Road	Leicester	Leicester (bus or 30-min walk)	3
Middlesex	Lord's	St John's Wood, London	St John's Wood (Jubilee line)	13
Northamptonshire	County Ground, Wantage Road	Northampton	Northampton (20-min walk)	0
Nottinghamshire	Trent Bridge	West Bridgford, Nottingham	Nottingham (25-min walk)	7
Somerset	County Ground	Taunton	Taunton (10-min walk)	0
Surrey	The Oval	Kennington, London	Oval (Northern line)	23
Sussex	County Ground	Hove	Hove (10-min walk)	3
Warwickshire	Edgbaston	Birmingham	Five Ways or University	8
Worcestershire	New Road	Worcester	Worcester Foregate Street (10-min walk)	5
Yorkshire	Headingley	Leeds	Burley Park (10-min walk)	33

Two things jump off that table. The first is the concentration of honours: Yorkshire and Surrey have won more Championships between them than the other sixteen clubs combined, and three counties — Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire and Somerset — have never won it at all despite Gloucestershire and Somerset having been in the competition since the Victorian era. The second is how walkable the whole thing is. Fifteen of the eighteen grounds are reachable on foot from a main-line station in under half an hour, which is why county cricket remains one of the few professional sports in Britain you can genuinely do by train without planning a military operation.

Where the eighteen stand in the 2026 season

The County Championship runs in two divisions and, unusually, they are not the same size. From 2026 the top flight holds ten clubs and the second division eight, with the season stretching from early April to late September.

Division One 2026	Division Two 2026
Essex	Derbyshire
Glamorgan	Durham
Hampshire	Gloucestershire
Leicestershire	Kent
Nottinghamshire	Lancashire
Somerset	Middlesex
Surrey	Northamptonshire
Sussex	Worcestershire
Warwickshire
Yorkshire

Set that against the honours column and you get the point of the modern competition immediately: Lancashire and Middlesex, between them twenty-two-time champions, are both in the lower tier, while Leicestershire, who spent a decade being written off entirely, are in the upper one. Historic weight buys nothing. The full squad-by-squad picture for each tier sits in our rundowns of the Division One clubs and the Division Two clubs, and the mechanics of how points are earned and places decided are in the County Championship explained.

London and the south east: money, crowds and short journeys

Five counties sit in the wealthiest corner of the map, and they could not be less alike.

Surrey are the establishment club of the modern era. The Oval is a genuine Test ground in a dense bit of inner London, reached by walking out of a Northern line station and turning left, and Surrey's membership is measured in tens of thousands because the catchment is the largest in Britain. A Championship day here draws crowds that would be a decent Blast night elsewhere.

Middlesex play at Lord's and own none of it. They are tenants of Marylebone Cricket Club, which means the most famous cricket ground on earth is home to a county with no control over its own fixture list. The practical effect for a supporter is that Middlesex sometimes decamp to Radlett in Hertfordshire when Lord's is busy, and that a Middlesex Championship day at headquarters is one of the strangest and best-value experiences in English sport — a vast empty ground, a few hundred people in the Pavilion, and the slope doing exactly what it does in a Test.

Essex at Chelmsford are the counter-argument to the idea that money decides everything. A small, tight ground ten minutes from the station, wedged between a river and a housing estate, has produced one of the most consistently successful sides of the last forty years. The crowd is knowledgeable and close enough to the boundary to be heard.

Kent at Canterbury play at a ground on a hill with an outfield that slopes visibly, in a cathedral city that fills with day-trippers in summer. St Lawrence has a claim to the longest continuous festival tradition in the country.

Sussex at Hove play below street level in a residential grid a quarter of a mile from the Channel, and the sea fret that rolls in during the afternoon is a genuine tactical factor. Deckchairs are still put out. It is the most relaxing ground on the circuit and the hardest to leave.

The Midlands: six counties, one small map

Nowhere else in world cricket packs six professional clubs into an area you could drive across in two hours, which tells you something about how the eighteen came to exist — the boundaries were drawn when travel was slow and local loyalty was absolute.

Warwickshire at Edgbaston have the loudest ground in the country and the largest capacity outside Lord's. Birmingham crowds are the least reverent in England and the Eric Hollies Stand has no equivalent anywhere, though a Championship Wednesday in April at the same ground is a very quiet business indeed.

Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge own the connoisseur's ground: a beautiful pavilion, the best sightlines in England, and a crowd that watches rather than performs. It is a twenty-five-minute walk across the Trent from Nottingham station and worth every minute of it.

Worcestershire at New Road have the view — the cathedral rising directly over the boundary — and the drainage problems, because the Severn regularly puts the outfield under water in winter. No ground in England photographs better in June.

Leicestershire at Grace Road, Derbyshire at the County Ground and Northamptonshire at Wantage Road are working county grounds in the honest sense: modest stands, cheap admission, a members' bar with the scorecards pinned up, and cricket watched by people who have been coming for decades. Derbyshire also decamp to Queen's Park in Chesterfield, a municipal park with a bandstand and a boating lake, which is one of the loveliest days out in the sport.

The north: Yorkshire, Lancashire and the newest county

Yorkshire are the most successful club in the competition's history by a distance, and Headingley is a tight, awkward, atmospheric ground shared with a rugby league stadium that produces more remarkable cricket per acre than anywhere in the country. Yorkshire also run the Scarborough festival every August, and North Marine Road on a full Festival day — deckchairs, Victorian pavilion, the North Sea three streets away — is the best day's cricket watching in England.

Lancashire at Old Trafford have the most modernised of the county headquarters, complete with an attached hotel and a Metrolink stop at the gates, which makes it the easiest big northern ground to reach. The redevelopment turned the square through ninety degrees and gave the place a stadium feel that regulars mourn and newcomers rather like.

The fixture between the two is the oldest and hardest in the county game, and it retains a temperature that surprises players who have not experienced it — the full history is in the Roses rivalry.

Durham, admitted in 1992 and champions within twenty years, play at Chester-le-Street with Lumley Castle over one boundary and a genuinely cold north-easterly over the other. It is the newest first-class ground in the country and the one where the ball moves most in April.

The west and Wales: the counties people fall for

Somerset at Taunton run the loudest small ground in England. The County Ground sits in the middle of a market town, ten minutes from the station and two minutes from the pubs, and a Blast night here sells out in a way the fixture list does not warrant. Somerset supporters are the most committed in the country and the club's failure to win a Championship — repeatedly, agonisingly, including on final afternoons — has become part of the identity.

Gloucestershire in Bristol play at a ground in a residential suburb rather than the city centre, and take a week each July to Cheltenham College, where marquees are pitched around a boundary in front of Regency architecture. The Cheltenham festival dates to the 1870s and is the prettiest cricket week in Britain.

Hampshire left Southampton's old Northlands Road ground in 2001 for a purpose-built stadium out at West End, which is comfortable, spacious, staged international cricket almost immediately and is the one ground on this list that genuinely needs a bus or a car. Legroom and sightlines are the best of any county headquarters.

Glamorgan are Welsh, which makes a competition called the County Championship a two-nation affair. Sophia Gardens sits in parkland across the Taff from Cardiff city centre, twenty minutes' walk from Cardiff Central, and is arguably the most convenient international ground in Britain.

Our county ground travel and facilities guide goes venue by venue for anyone planning trips, and the ranked, opinionated version — which grounds are actually worth the journey — is in the best grounds for fans.

What each county plays for across a season

Every one of the eighteen enters three domestic competitions, and the shape of a season differs enormously depending on which of them a club is good at.

The County Championship is fourteen four-day matches, played mostly at the cold ends of the season, and it is the trophy every club says it wants most. The Vitality Blast is the Twenty20 competition, played in regional groups on summer evenings, and it is where the money and the crowds are — the format's history and structure are covered in the T20 Blast guide. The Metro Bank One Day Cup is the fifty-over competition, now largely a development tournament played while the internationals are elsewhere, and it is set out in the One Day Cup guide.

Then there is the Hundred, which is not a county competition at all. Its eight teams are separate entities based at eight grounds, most of them county headquarters. The ten counties that do not host one are in a materially different commercial position from the eight that do, and that asymmetry is now the central financial fact of the domestic game.

Choosing a county to follow

If you are picking rather than inheriting, three questions settle it faster than the honours board.

How far is the ground? County cricket rewards turning up, and a four-day match is something you drop in on for an afternoon rather than commit a Saturday to. A club forty minutes away that you will visit fifteen times beats a glamorous one three hours away that you will visit twice.

What are they actually playing for? A Division Two side chasing promotion gives you a better summer than a mid-table Division One side coasting. A club with a strong Blast record gives you Friday nights rather than Tuesday mornings.

Does the summer have shape? Check whether your county hosts a Hundred team, an international, or a festival week. Those three things decide whether the season has peaks in it.

Once you have chosen, join. A county membership is the cheapest serious ticket in British sport — a single card typically covers more than forty days of professional cricket across the three competitions, and most cards include reciprocal entry at other counties' grounds. The tiers, prices and what each level admits you to are set out in the county membership guide.

Frequently asked questions

How many county cricket teams are there in England?

Eighteen first-class counties, covering England and Wales. Seventeen are English and one, Glamorgan, is Welsh. The list has been unchanged since Durham were admitted in 1992, and there are also twenty national counties below them playing a separate non-first-class competition.

Which county cricket team is the most successful?

Yorkshire, with thirty-three County Championship titles including one shared — more than double the next club that is not Surrey. Surrey are second on twenty-three. Between them they account for more titles than the other sixteen counties put together.

Which counties have never won the County Championship?

Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire and Somerset. All three have won limited-overs trophies; the drought is specific to the four-day competition, and in Somerset's case it includes several seasons decided on the final afternoon.

What are the county cricket grounds and where are they?

The eighteen headquarters are listed in the table above, from Chester-le-Street in the north east to the Utilita Bowl in Hampshire and Sophia Gardens in Cardiff. Six of them stage Test cricket — The Oval, Lord's, Edgbaston, Old Trafford, Headingley and Trent Bridge — with Southampton and Cardiff also on the international rota.

Which county should I support?

Whichever one you can reach easily. Proximity matters more than history in a sport built on dropping in for an afternoon. If two clubs are equally close, pick the one whose fixtures suit your week — Blast nights if you want evenings, Championship cricket if you want quiet weekdays.

Do county teams play in the Hundred?

No. The Hundred's eight sides are separate teams based at eight venues, most of which are county grounds. County players appear in it, but they do so for the Hundred franchise rather than for their county, and the ten counties without a host team receive a share of the competition's revenue instead.

Where to go next

If this is your starting point, the sensible order is: pick a county from the table, check its next home Championship fixture, and go for an afternoon — it costs less than a cinema ticket in most of the country. From there, the England cricket hub tracks the season as it happens, cricket in England covers the wider domestic game, and the full professional pyramid the eighteen sit on top of is mapped in English domestic cricket structure. For the clubs' longer institutional history — admissions, finances and why the number never changes — see our first-class counties reference.

Ground names, division composition and admission prices change from season to season. Confirm fixtures and prices with the county before you travel.