Lord's Moves to St John's Wood — Thomas Lord's Third Ground, May 1814

Lord's tenure of his second ground had been brief and unprofitable. The Napoleonic War had reduced fixture lists to a trickle, MCC was financially weak, and Lord himself was running out of credit with the investors who had backed him in 1787. The Regent's Canal eviction would have ruined many lesser entrepreneurs. The Eyre estate's offer — a 99-year leasehold at a moderate ground rent — was the lifeline.

Through the autumn of 1813 Lord negotiated with Eyre and arranged for the careful lifting and transport of the Middle Ground turf. The story that the turf was carried by horse and cart in winter to its new home is well attested in early MCC records. The site at St John's Wood lay between Wellington Road and the future Grove End Road; the present pavilion is roughly on the line of the old duck pond.

Thomas Lord (1755-1832) was a Yorkshire-born wine merchant turned cricket entrepreneur who had founded his first ground at Dorset Square in 1787 under the patronage of the Earl of Winchilsea and the Duke of Richmond. The lease on that ground expired in 1810 and Lord moved his operations a short distance to a second ground in north Marylebone, which opened in 1811. The Middle Ground proved no more permanent: Parliament's 1812 act for the construction of the Regent's Canal sliced through the outfield, and by 1813 Lord knew he would have to move again. Colonel Henry Samuel Eyre of the Eyre family estate offered Lord a leasehold on a plot of land at St John's Wood, then a semi-rural area on the northern edge of London. The site had been a duck pond on land that sloped from north-west to south-east — the famous slope of Lord's, dropping about eight feet across the playing area, dates from the original topography. Lord had the turf of the Middle Ground dug up and re-laid on the new site over the winter of 1813-14, a piece of sentimentalism that became part of the ground's mythology. A wooden pavilion was put up by the spring of 1814 and the Lord's Tavern, an extension of the original Dorset Square hostelry, was opened nearby. The ground was ready for play by May 1814; the formal opening came with the MCC v Hertfordshire fixture on 22 June 1814.

“Lord, with characteristic doggedness, had his turf taken up and re-laid on the new site, that nothing of the old ground might be lost.”

The new Lord's became the centre of cricket within a decade. By 1815 the first centuries on the ground had been scored; by 1819 the Gentlemen v Players fixture had been revived there. William Ward bought the lease from Lord in 1825 to save it from a property developer, an episode that secured the ground's future. By 1864 the ground was hosting the law-changing reforms that produced overarm bowling. By 1900 it was the headquarters of cricket worldwide.