Ewood Park as it was at the time of the two championships.

This image is (c) Cottontown and is used with permission

A tram is waved onto Kinder Street (the street which was behind the Blackburn End) to drop off fans for the game in 1929.

This image is (c) Cottontown and is used with permission

Cup fever hits Ewood in 1937 as fans squeeze in for the visit of Accrington Stanley. The game finished 1-1.

This picture is © Lancashire Evening Telegraph and is used with permission

The old Riverside stand awaiting demolition in 1988.

This picture is © Blackburn Library and is used with permission

Modern Ewood as we know it. This was taken at the last game of the 2003/04 season and facing the Walkersteel/Riverside stand. The scoreboard and Darwen End can be seen to the right.

This picture is © Scott Slater and is used with permission

Ewood Park is today known throughout the world as being the home ground of Blackburn Rovers but when it was originally built it was not in any way related to the club that was to go on to make it famous. In fact, Ewood Park did not start as just a football ground at all!

In 1882 four local businessmen financed the construction of a new sports ground in the Ewood area of Blackburn. The cost of the new ground was a colossal £10,000. The new ground originally staged mainly athletics, dog racing and a sport advertised as ‘trotting’, whatever that may have been. There was also football there, at least there probably was anyway. It is believed to be that this was the ‘Ewood Bridge’ ground where Rovers played four matches during the April of 1882, winning all four.

The ground was certainly fit for the staging of the highest level of football, as was proved on 19th March 1887 when it staged the England v Scotland home international. Scotland beat England (who fielded two Rovers players) 3-2. It may not have had its own football team just yet but it was already becoming known as a great venue.

After the landlord of their Leamington Street ground increased the rent to unacceptable levels, Rovers looked elsewhere for a suitable home. Their eyes naturally fell upon the international stadium across the town in the Ewood area of Blackburn. With excellent transport links such as a tram line along Bolton Road linking it to the town centre and the nearby Mill Hill train station, Ewood Park seemed the only logical choice for a team of the ambition of Rovers. After agreeing a ten-year lease at an annual rent of £60 per year (rising to £70 after five years) Rovers moved into their new ground in the summer of 1890. They certainly needed a ground to match their stature, having recently thrashed ‘The Wednesday’ 6-1 to win the FA Cup for the fourth time. With the short move to Ewood, their wandering days were over for good.

During the summer Rovers spent over £1,000 making adjustments to the ground to bring it up to a satisfactory standard to cope with a long season of league football. The first match at Ewood was, like Rovers’ first ever league match, played against Accrington. The game ended 0-0. The ground, however, managed a more favourable result when it was chosen as the venue of the England v Scotland home international. This time England performed more ably at the ground, winning 2-1 in front of a crowd of over 10,000, although no Rovers players were in the England side. As Rovers had seen the potential of the ground by now, they arranged in 1893 to purchase the site for £2,500. The club also experimented with artificial lighting in a testimonial match for Jack Southworth, although this wasn’t to become a permanent feature for another six decades.

Ewood Park is today known throughout the world as being the home ground of Blackburn Rovers but when it was originally built it was not in any way related to the club that was to go on to make it famous. In fact, Ewood Park did not start as just a football ground at all!

In 1882 four local businessmen financed the construction of a new sports ground in the Ewood area of Blackburn. The cost of the new ground was a colossal £10,000. The new ground originally staged mainly athletics, dog racing and a sport advertised as ‘trotting’, whatever that may have been. There was also football there, at least there probably was anyway. It is believed to be that this was the ‘Ewood Bridge’ ground where Rovers played four matches during the April of 1882, winning all four.

The ground was certainly fit for the staging of the highest level of football, as was proved on 19th March 1887 when it staged the England v Scotland home international. Scotland beat England (who fielded two Rovers players) 3-2. It may not have had its own football team just yet but it was already becoming known as a great venue.

After the landlord of their Leamington Street ground increased the rent to unacceptable levels, Rovers looked elsewhere for a suitable home. Their eyes naturally fell upon the international stadium across the town in the Ewood area of Blackburn. With excellent transport links such as a tram line along Bolton Road linking it to the town centre and the nearby Mill Hill train station, Ewood Park seemed the only logical choice for a team of the ambition of Rovers. After agreeing a ten-year lease at an annual rent of £60 per year (rising to £70 after five years) Rovers moved into their new ground in the summer of 1890. They certainly needed a ground to match their stature, having recently thrashed ‘The Wednesday’ 6-1 to win the FA Cup for the fourth time. With the short move to Ewood, their wandering days were over for good.

During the summer Rovers spent over £1,000 making adjustments to the ground to bring it up to a satisfactory standard to cope with a long season of league football. The first match at Ewood was, like Rovers’ first ever league match, played against Accrington. The game ended 0-0. The ground, however, managed a more favourable result when it was chosen as the venue of the England v Scotland home international. This time England performed more ably at the ground, winning 2-1 in front of a crowd of over 10,000, although no Rovers players were in the England side. As Rovers had seen the potential of the ground by now, they arranged in 1893 to purchase the site for £2,500. The club also experimented with artificial lighting in a testimonial match for Jack Southworth, although this wasn’t to become a permanent feature for another six decades.

The biggest crowd in the history of the ground congregated there on 6th March 1929 for the sixth round FA Cup visit of Bolton Wanderers. A total of 62,522 souls turned up to see the holders (Rovers) being held to a 1-1 draw by their Lancashire rivals. Over 65,000 went to Burnden Park for the replay meaning amazingly almost 130,000 paying fans saw the two games. It was only cup games that really brought the Blackburn public in droves to the ground. Of their league opponents, only Burnley could be expected to regularly entice over 40,000 to the games. The warning signs were there that Blackburn was in trouble, both the club and the town. The depression hit Blackburn as hard as it did almost any place in the country. Gates were badly affected and went down throughout the thirties although a tasty cup tie could still be called upon for those hard-up to spend money they couldn’t really afford to be spending on football. Burnley’s relegation in 1930 hadn’t helped.

By the mid-1950s Rovers were finally back in the first division (after years of near-misses at promotion) and permanent floodlights were erected in Blackburn for the first time. Two years later, the club reached the 1960 FA Cup final and used the proceeds from the cup run to put a roof over the Blackburn End. After seventy years, those Rovers fans standing on the Blackburn End finally some cover from the elements. Despite this, Rovers would never again attract such a large number of fans. The highest average league attendance was set in 1958/59 when an average of 30,544 watched the league games at Ewood Park. The season later they had a higher average attendance than the champions, Burnley. Attendances were to take a sharp drop however and with immediate effect. Thanks mainly to a ticketing fiasco centred on the FA Cup Final. It involved thousands of Rovers fans being unable to buy a ticket while club officials allegedly sold their spare tickets to the highest bidders, touting them in the pubs and clubs of the town. Regardless of the truth of the situation, what is undeniable is that it led to a huge drop in attendances as the average gates went down by about 40% in the space of just twelve months.

With lower crowds and relegation soon to follow, no further major building work was carried out on the stadium until the 1980s and even that wasn’t a planned development. Instead it was thanks to the fire-starting hands of a young arsonist. A fire engulfed the part of the Nuttal Street Stand that stood closest to the Blackburn End in July 1984. Fire engines arrived quickly to stop the fire spreading to the rest of the stand but a substantial chunk (probably about a quarter) of the stand had to be demolished. Instead of merely rebuilding the part of the stand the board took the decision for a radical (for them) new design which would be two banks of executive boxes placed on top of each other. It was named the John Lewis Complex after one of the founders of the club and also had a restaurant, the John Lewis Suite, at the rear. What could have been a disastrous incident actually led to a major revenue generator for the club which provided some much-needed income to allow Rovers to not only stay in the Second Division but also to challenge for promotion.

A less happy outcome was to be the fate of the Riverside Stand however as it was declared to be unsafe in high winds. The whole stand had to be demolished and a fund was set up to build a new Riverside. It is at this point that one Jack Walker enters the story of Ewood Park. The company he owned, Walkersteel, provided all the steel required by the stand free of charge. A new all-seater stand was built and named the Walkersteel Stand after the company whose generosity had made its construction possible and enabled it to provide seating for 7,000. More importantly than that, it brought Jack Walker into sustained contact with the club and its directors. After some discussions the club was soon in his hands and a spending spree was about to begin. Times like these had not been seen at Ewood since the earliest decades of the century.

Plans were immediately drawn up for a completely new stadium capable of seating just under 40,000 people. Although an out-of-town stadium was considered it was decided that Ewood was the natural home of the club. First to go was the Darwen End in the 1992/93 season, with the new two-tier stand opening at the start of the 1993/94 season. The Blackburn End opened shortly after. Not only was the Blackburn End terracing gone, so was the anachronistic tramline that ran behind the stand on a cobbled street. The grandiose Nuttal Street Stand, once though of as one of the finest in the country, saw its last game on January 8th 1994. Fittingly it was a cup tie as its most packed moments had usually been for FA Cup matches. The game ended 3-3 against Portsmouth. Although plenty of history had to be demolished (included the terraced houses of the Nuttal Street itself), the famous wooden boardroom was dismantled piece by piece and rebuilt in the new Jack Walker Stand, named so by directors wishing to thank the munificence of the benefactor.

By the time the Premiership title had been won, three sides of the ground had been built to roughly the same model. As had an onsite pub (Blues Bar), car park and merchandising store. Gone were the days when the Rovers shop did its business from the downstairs front room of a house on Nuttal Street, or indeed from a mobile hut for that matter.

The plans for the Riverside/Walkersteel Stand were to be even more awe-inspiring. A hotel was mooted as was a cinema and entertainment centre. A huge football museum perhaps and office blocks, all reached by a dedicated train station just outside the stand. Whether such a project would have happened if Rovers had not been relegated in 1999 is debatable. The plans were there but the attendance had never got above an average of 27,552, which was reached in the post-championship season of 1995/96. The longer it was left, the less likelihood there was of it happening and that was when Jack Walker was still alive. When he died in August 2000, there was even less chance of it becoming reality. As the crowds are not really there to validate spending so much money on a new stand, there is unlikely to be any major work taking place at Ewood Park for a long time. It isn’t really needed as despite not being perfect just yet (although you could say three sides are) it is still one of the most impressive stadiums in the country. The conference facilities are often used and helped along by local MP Jack Straw who can be called open to push the claims of Ewood as a centre for international meetings and debates. The facilities are undoubtedly excellent and of Premiership or even European standard. It may not be the biggest ground in terms of capacity but in terms of quality it is to be admired.

The tramlines may have gone, as has Nuttal Street and the terracing, yet in April 2007 Ewood Park celebrates its 125th birthday. It is only seven years younger than the club itself. A true institution and monument in Blackburn and one of its greatest draws to the town, if not the greatest which it probably is as well. Unless you have family in the area, Blackburn isn’t the kind of place you necessarily come back to time after time, nor is anywhere in East Lancashire for that matter. Ewood Park, however, is. Anyone with any kind of adequate knowledge of football can tell you that Ewood Park is in Blackburn, home to the Rovers. The four businessmen who funded the new ground during the reign of Queen Victoria would have been ambitious gentlemen, yet even they couldn’t have dreamed that Ewood Park would have such a glorious future. One which should have quite a time yet in which to run…