Lancashire County Cricket Club Founded — Manchester's Game Gets Organised, 1864

The All-England Eleven's visits to Manchester in the 1840s and 1850s had demonstrated that Lancashire's cricket public was as large and as passionate as any in England. What had been missing was the county club to channel that passion into organised representative cricket.

Manchester had been a major cricket city since the 1820s; the ground at Old Trafford, developed from 1857 onward by the Manchester Cricket Club, was already one of the best in the north of England. What was lacking was a county-level organisation that could represent Lancashire's cricketing strength in the national fixture list and eventually in a county championship. The 1864 founders drew on the Manchester Cricket Club's infrastructure and on the amateur network of Lancashire's mill-owning and professional classes. Early Lancashire cricket was strongly amateur in character; the professional strength that would make Lancashire a powerhouse of the championship era came later. The county's founding in the same year as Middlesex reflected a national reorganisation of cricket's administrative structure, driven partly by the growing commercial success of county cricket and partly by the MCC's interest in rationalising the county system.

Lancashire grew quickly in competitive strength through the 1870s and 1880s and became one of the dominant forces of the County Championship era. Old Trafford became a Test match venue in 1884.