City Ground
The City Ground is a football stadium in West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire, England, on the banks of the River Trent. It has been home to Nottingham Forest since 1898 and has a capacity of 31,042, with plans to increase capacity to 45,000 by 2031 and eventually to 52,500 by 2033.
The stadium was a venue when England hosted UEFA Euro 1996, and is only away from Meadow Lane, home of Forest's neighbouring club Notts County; the two grounds are the closest professional football stadiums in England and the second-closest in the United Kingdom, after Tannadice Park and Dens Park. They are located on opposite sides of the River Trent.
History
Background
Nottingham Forest are the oldest league football club in the world, and were founded in 1865, but did not move to the City Ground, their seventh home, until 33 years later in 1898. For their first fourteen years the club played most of their matches at the Forest Recreation Ground, from which they took their name. This was common land so the club were unable to exploit their matches commercially, and as there was no gate money, revenue came mainly from the players' membership fees. When Forest first entered the FA Cup in 1878–79, reaching the semi-finals, they were unable to play home fixtures, as the cup competition rules stipulated that spectators should be charged admission. In 1879 the club left The Forest to play at the Castle Ground in The Meadows, after the Notts Castle Football Club which had previously played there disbanded and its players joined Forest. This allowed Forest to charge admission in time for its second FA Cup campaign in 1879–80. Rapidly-growing interest in the game saw the ability to accommodate large numbers of spectators at football matches increase in importance, and from 1880 most of the club's important games were played at Trent Bridge Cricket Ground, then Nottingham's most advanced enclosed sports venue. In 1883, however, Forest were abruptly replaced as tenants at Trent Bridge by local rivals Notts County, a move possibly connected with Notts County's appointment of the assistant secretary of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club to their own newly created post of paid Club Secretary.Forest only discovered they were being replaced at Trent Bridge in early August 1883, leaving them very little time to find a new ground, and the Parkside Ground in Lenton, where Forest first played on 22 September, was criticised for its distance from the town, its slope and its uneven surface, with one newspaper columnist commenting that "so long as the Forest Club will maintain a ground on which it is impossible for them to play their particular game accurately, in addition to being bleak and generally inaccessible, they will meet with little patronage". Despite moving three years later to the nearby Gregory Ground, which was much better reviewed in the press, Lenton's distance from the centre of Nottingham saw attendances continue to decline and in 1890 the club moved again, this time to the Town Ground in The Meadows, which was much closer to the club's roots and became Forest's first proper football stadium.
In July 1897, the Town Ground was briefly renamed the City Ground, in recognition of Nottingham being granted city status, but the newly-formed city council planned to redevelop the site for building and terminated Forest's lease, offering instead the site on the south side of the river that would become today's City Ground. This land had been granted to the Mayor and Burgesses of Nottingham by Edward VI in a royal charter dated 21 February 1551, with the intention that rentals from the agricultural land would pay for the upkeep of the adjacent Trent Bridge. The City Council granted the club a 21-year lease on the new site, and the club approved the scheme to move to the new ground at their annual meeting in December 1897. To raise the £3,000 required to finance the move the club asked members, supporters and businessmen to subscribe to "New Ground Scheme" bonds which cost £5 each, raising over £2,000. Many of the bonds were never redeemed, the bondholders effectively making a donation to fund the new ground.
Early years
Forest first played at the new City Ground a week before their FA Cup final victory in April 1898, and the reserve team played there on the afternoon of the final itself, but the ground was not officially opened until the first match of the following season, a Division One game against Blackburn Rovers on 3 September 1898 with an attendance of 15,000. The ground had a wooden-slatted main stand on the west side with a barrel roof, a narrow wooden shelter covering the full width of the Trent End, and a shorter roof covering part of the east side. The pitch was considered to be among the finest in the country, "a velvet carpet of lush turf". This was the result of the work of club committee-member William Bardill, a nurseryman and landscape gardener whose family firm still exists in Stapleford. Bardill excavated the playing area to a depth of two feet, lay a bed of clinker to ensure perfect drainage, and on top lay a pitch of high-quality turf brought by barge up the river from Radcliffe-on-Trent.Forest's first round FA Cup match against Aston Villa in 1898 attracted a crowd of 32,070, the first time a football match in Nottingham had attracted gate receipts of over £1,000. The ground was considered to be "one of the best in the country" and was chosen to host the FA Cup Semi final in 1899, recognition that was proclaimed at the club's annual meeting to be "beneficial to the club and the city". The ground held a total of four FA Cup semi-finals between 1899 and 1905, and a full international match between England and Wales in 1909.
Throughout the 1900s, Notts County also regularly used the City Ground for home matches when their usual venue at Trent Bridge was unavailable for football due to cricket taking precedence.
The new ground was also called the City Ground. It was only half a mile from the old City Ground. Nottingham was granted its Charter as a city in 1897 and the name was changed from the Town Ground to the City Ground to commemorate this. Contrary to popular belief the New City Ground has never been in the city, a story circulated when they became world famous in the 1980s claiming that there had been a boundary change but this was proved to be incorrect.
The City Ground was the first football ground to have elliptically shaped goalposts when it was presented with a new set of goals by the Nottingham-based Standard Goals Company in 1922. Before this, goalposts had usually been round or square. This shape eventually became commonplace, but the FA's ruling in 1938 that the 8-yard width of a goal should be measured from the inside of such posts meant that the City Ground's goals had been two inches too narrow for the preceding sixteen years.
In 1935, the club declined an opportunity to buy the ground from Nottingham Corporation for £7,000.
During World War II, the City Ground held a variety of events to entertain off-duty servicemen, including boxing, horse gymkhanas, and visits from zoos. The pitch was badly damaged by bombing on the night of 8–9 May 1941, with repairs costing £75 9s 11d.
Post war
The City Ground was flooded after the adjacent River Trent burst its banks in March 1947, with Forest having to play some home fixtures at Meadow Lane. Many archives and official records were damaged and floodwaters reached as high as the crossbars of the goals, with swans seen swimming the full length of the pitch.After winning promotion in 1950, Forest drew up plans for redeveloping the City Ground, and detailed plans were drawn up by local architects Reginald Cooper and Partners in 1951. The first step was the extension and covering of the Trent End in 1954, though a planned second tier of seats at this end was never built. On 12 October 1957, a new East Stand opened, costing £40,000 and having benches to seat up to 2,500 fans to the rear of the terrace. Together with improvements to the Colwick Road Terrace this gave the ground an increased capacity of 48,000, with 6,500 seats for the club's first season in the First Division since 1925. The visitors for the opening were Manchester United's "Busby Babes", just four months before eight of them died in the Munich air disaster, and the match on 12 October 1957 saw a new record attendance of 47,804.
Although Forest had pioneered floodlit football matches, holding a game illuminated by Wells lights at the Gregory Ground in March 1889, the City Ground was the second from last top division ground to install permanent floodlights. The floodlights at the ground were first used on 11 September 1961 as Forest faced Gillingham in the League Cup. Four 120 ft pylons were built, one in each corner of the ground, with each pylon holding a bank of thirty-six 1,500 watt lights. The ground's all-time record attendance of 49,946 was set in October 1967 when Forest beat Manchester United 3–1 in a First Division fixture, five months after Forest had finished second to United in the league.
In December 1967, the City Ground was host to an England U23 match against Italy.
The Main Stand was re-roofed, extended and refurbished between 1962 and 1965, with new offices, changing rooms, kit stores, medical suites and press rooms to the rear. On 24 August 1968, however, fire broke out in the stand during a First Division game against Leeds United. It started near the dressing rooms and spread rapidly through the largely wooden structure. The stand was damaged but, despite a crowd numbering 31,126, none of them was injured. The only reported injuries were to a television crew on the gantry, who had to scramble down it because the access ladder was stored in the boiler room. The gantry was extended the length of the stand and now has access at both ends. Many of the club's records, trophies and other memorabilia were also lost in the fire. The stand's roof was undamaged, however, allowing the club to rebuild the base of the stand underneath it in concrete and steel. As a result of the fire, Forest played six "home" matches at Meadow Lane, losing all of them, and after returning to the City Ground used the changing rooms of nearby Trent Bridge while the Main Stand was rebuilt.
The Executive Stand was opened in August 1980 and was built at a cost of £2.5 million – largely from proceeds of the highly successful era in which Forest won consecutive League Cups, the League title and consecutive European Cups.
Under Clough's reign, Forest had taken the English domestic game and the European scene by storm and money raised from those successes was invested in a stand that had a capacity of 10,000. It was renamed The Brian Clough Stand after his retirement and was re-opened after refurbishment by Clough himself in the mid-1990s. The stand also incorporated 36 executive boxes and a large dining area, which was designed to be the focus of the club's corporate hospitality arrangements. The stand had the word "FOREST" spelt out in white seats against the red seats of the upper tier, the first stand in football known to have used this form of coloured seat identification. The opening of the new stand gave the City Ground a capacity of 35,567, including 15,009 seats, a figure that would remain broadly constant until terrace capacities began to be cut after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989.