Thomas Lord Sells the Ground — William Ward Saves Lord's, July 1825

Thomas Lord had founded his first ground in 1787 at the request of the original White Conduit Club, the body that became MCC. He moved it twice — to North Bank in 1811 and to the present St John's Wood site in 1814. Each move was forced by lease pressure or by the building of the Regent's Canal.

By the mid-1820s the leasehold pattern of Marylebone meant Lord could profit handsomely from sub-letting building plots. Ward, who had scored 278 for MCC against Norfolk at Lord's in 1820 (a record that stood for a century), was the obvious figure with both the cricketing motive and the personal fortune to intervene.

Lord had moved his ground three times since opening the first in 1787 and the present St John's Wood site dated from 1814. By the mid-1820s the surrounding district was being aggressively developed for housing, and Lord — by then 70 years old — concluded that selling building plots over the playing area would yield more income than gate money. He secured planning permission for a scheme that would have reduced the cricket field to roughly 150 square yards. William Ward, the MCC's leading amateur batsman of the era and a director of the Bank of England, intervened with a personal cheque for £5,000 in cash to buy out Lord's interest and preserve the ground. The transaction is one of the most consequential financial moments in cricket's history. Ward then held the ground until 1835. On the night of 28 July 1825, after the Winchester v Harrow schools match had finished earlier that day, the pavilion caught fire and burned down. The MCC's archive of scores, records and correspondence going back to 1787 was destroyed; the loss is the principal reason that early MCC and Hambledon-era cricket has been so difficult for historians to reconstruct in detail. The pavilion was promptly rebuilt by Lord himself, who continued to live in St John's Wood until 1830 and died at West Meon in Hampshire in 1832.

“Mr Ward, with a generosity which the cricket world has not forgotten, paid Mr Lord the sum he asked, and the ground was saved.”

Ward managed the ground actively for a decade, hosting the roundarm trial match of 1827 and the first Oxford v Cambridge fixture of the same year. The fire's damage to the archive could not be repaired; Arthur Haygarth's Scores and Biographies, begun in the 1840s, had to reconstruct the cricket record from external sources. Ward sold the ground to James Dark in 1835 for £2,000 plus an annuity.