Qualla: Marylebone Cricket Club

Marylebone Cricket Club: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dilshot Rahimov, CC0. The match was advertised in the Morning Herald for 21 May 1787, eleven Noblemen of the White Conduit Club against eleven Gentlemen of Middlesex for 500 guineas a side. The new cricket ground was on a stretch of pasture in Marylebone, leased by a young Yorkshire wine merchant and gifted bowler called Thomas Lord, who had been hired by the aristocratic White Conduit members to find them somewhere private to play - somewhere away from the rough crowds of Islington who had been heckling them at White Conduit Fields. No report of the match survives. But it was the first match on Lord's new ground, and the cricket historian G. B. Buckley called the same paper's notice 'the earliest notice of the Marylebone Club.' The MCC was 239 years old in 2026, and it still owns the same square of north London turf, two grounds along from where Thomas Lord first laid out his pitch.

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Image: Dilshot Rahimov | CC0

Marylebone Cricket Club: The Laws

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Herry Lawford from Stockbridge, UK, CC BY 2.0. In 1788, a year after the club was founded, the MCC issued a revised set of the Laws of Cricket. It was a presumptuous act for a private members' club - cricket was already played from Hampshire to Kent and beyond - but no one challenged it, and from that moment the MCC became th...

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Image: Herry Lawford from Stockbridge, UK | CC BY 2.0

Marylebone Cricket Club: Thomas Lord and Three Grounds

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Sutton, CC BY-SA 2.0. Thomas Lord moved his ground three times. The first, the one used for that 1787 match, was at Dorset Square in Marylebone. He took a second ground at North Bank near Lisson Grove from 1809, but the Regent's Canal was about to slice straight through it. In 1814 he laid out the pre...

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Image: John Sutton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Marylebone Cricket Club: Letting Women In

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nieszczarda2, CC BY-SA 4.0. For 212 years, women could not be members. They were not even allowed in the Long Room of the Pavilion during play, with one exception: the Queen, as the club's patron. In the 1990s Rachael Heyhoe Flint, the former England captain, applied for membership as 'R Flint', trying to s...

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Image: Nieszczarda2 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Marylebone Cricket Club: Bacon and Egg

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rs-nourse, CC BY 4.0. The MCC tie - scarlet and gold stripes, said to look like 'bacon and egg' - is one of the most recognisable in sport. No one is entirely sure where the colours came from. The club originally wore sky blue. One theory traces the red and gold to the racing colours of the Dukes of R...

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Image: Rs-nourse | CC BY 4.0

Marylebone Cricket Club: Modern Trouble, Modern Reform

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PaddyBriggs, Public domain. The MCC has not always handled change gracefully. In 2012 the Vision for Lord's redevelopment plan - which would have built residential flats on part of the ground - split the membership; the former Prime Minister Sir John Major resigned from the Main Committee over the way the d...

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Image: PaddyBriggs | Public domain