The ground's beginnings were unglamorous. In the 1850s, this corner of the second Sydney Common was part sandhills, part swamp, and partly a rubbish dump. In 1851 a slice of it was handed to the British Army as a garden and cricket pitch for the soldiers of Victoria Barracks. The 11th North Devonshire Regiment flattened the southern end of their rifle range, and the soldiers formed themselves into the Garrison Club. When the ground opened in February 1854 it was simply the Garrison Ground. Over the next two decades it passed through a tangle of names and committees before the New South Wales Cricket Association took charge in the 1870s. It finally became the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1894. The pitch itself is laid on Bulli soil, trucked in from the town of Bulli down the coast, and it is that clay which has made the SCG the most spin-friendly Test wicket in Australia.

No name is woven more tightly into the SCG than Bradman. In the 1929 to 1930 season, Don Bradman scored 452 not out here for New South Wales against Queensland, the highest first-class innings then recorded anywhere on earth. The crowds came in numbers the ground has never seen since. On 15 December 1928, a record 58,446 packed in to watch Australia play England, a figure that will never be beaten now that seating has reduced the capacity. The gate money Bradman generated was poured back into the ground, funding the grand northern stand that bears his name. There is a quiet symmetry to the place, too. One of the carpenters who built the formwork for the old cycling track in 1896 was George Bradman, the great batsman's father.

For most of its life the SCG had the Hill, a grassy bank with no seating where the cheapest tickets bought you a spot on the slope. It was the realm of the working-class fan, and above all of Stephen Harold Gascoigne, the rabbitoh and bottle-merchant remembered simply as Yabba. His bellowed heckles became part of the spectacle, and a bronze statue of him now sits among the seats of the Victor Trumper Stand, mid-shout for all eternity. The Hill could turn ugly. In 1971, English fast bowler John Snow was grabbed by a spectator and pelted with cans after felling a tailender, and the England captain marched his team off the field. The grass slope was finally seated over in 1991, but Yabba's voice still echoes in the ground's mythology.

Cricket built the SCG, but it has hosted nearly every game Australians play. More than 1,390 top-grade rugby league premiership matches have been staged here, more than any ground in the country, and between 1913 and 1987 the Sydney grand final was almost always played on this turf. In 1965, an official crowd of 78,056 crammed in to watch St George beat South Sydney in the grand final, with thousands more reportedly perched on grandstand roofs. Australian rules football arrived permanently in 1982 when South Melbourne relocated north to become the Sydney Swans, and in 2014 the ground even hosted the first Major League Baseball games ever played in Australia, the Dodgers sweeping the Diamondbacks. Through it all, the heritage-listed Members' and Ladies' pavilions, with their cast-iron and clock towers, have kept watch since the 1870s and 1890s.