Britain's Lost Cricket Festivals: The Idyllic Club Grounds That Will Never Again Host the World's Best Players

2014 | Sport & Leisure

Following the huge success of Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds, Chris Arnot goes in search of the boundary ropes from around the country - from Essex at Southend to Wellingborough School - to relive the time when the greats of the international game including Glenn McGrath and Ian Botham lit up summer's afternoons at the summer cricket festivals. The cricket festival - when one of the county cricket clubs takes a week or so of games out of its home ground to a club ground somewhere else in the county, often at the seaside, and attracts a large and festive crowd to a bucolic arena fringed with white marquees, beer tents and deckchairs - is a declining phenomenon. Nowadays many counties don't venture beyond their Test match-standard stadia all season, and other, once peripatetic counties like Essex, who used to play at Southend, Colchester, Chelmsford, Clacton, Westcliff and Leyton during a single season, now only leave the County Ground once a season at most.

Visiting 30 lost festival grounds from Bournemouth to Abergavenny, Weston-super-Mare to Harrogate, and talking to former players, ground staff, club secretaries and spectators to re-live the days when the world's finest players, from Denis Compton to Barry Richards, came to town for one week only, packed the beer tent and thrilled the crowds. Published in time for the start of the cricket festival season with Kent at Tunbridge Wells and Sussex at Horsham, this book is armchair cricket at its best, and another perfect gift for every cricket fan.

Chris Arnot (Author)