Middlesex County Cricket Club Founded — Cricket Comes Home to Lord's, 1864

Surrey, founded in 1845, and Kent, with a coherent county structure from the 1840s, had long operated without a formal London county club as a rival. The 1864 formation reflected the broader organisational wave in county cricket that would culminate in the 1890 championship.

The creation of a Middlesex county club in 1864 filled an anomalous gap: London, as the home of Lord's and the MCC, had been the centre of English cricket for seventy years, yet the county had no formal representative club. Middlesex cricket had been played in various forms throughout the century but without the permanent organisation that Sussex, Kent and Surrey had achieved decades earlier. The 1864 founders drew on a network of London amateur clubs — Marylebone Club members, public school cricket networks — and on the professional talent that was abundant in the capital. Early Middlesex sides were dominated by amateurs; the professional structure that gave Kent and Surrey their competitive edge took longer to develop. The county played its home matches at Lord's, which gave it an unrivalled stage but also created an uneasy relationship with the MCC, which regarded Lord's as its own property and Middlesex as a subtenant. This tension between Middlesex CCC and MCC — both based at Lord's — was a peculiarity of English cricket administration for the next 160 years.

Middlesex grew steadily in strength through the 1870s and 1880s. They won their first County Championship in 1903 and have been one of the most successful counties in the competition's history.