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From Port of Spain to the mountains in India: Cricket’s most beautiful grounds ranked
The list of the world’s most beautiful Test grounds has a new entrant in its top six. For over a century, the Adelaide Oval has set the global standard; England has also been able to offer examples like Lord’s and Trent Bridge. But this newcomer is ticking all the boxes.
Here are cricket’s most beautiful grounds ranked.
6. Christchurch (New Zealand)
Born out of the earthquake which devastated Christchurch and its old rugby ground, Lancaster Park, which used to be South Island’s main cricket venue too.
The choice, after much resistance from residents who perhaps did not know their history, was Hagley Park: this was where the first English cricket touring team to New Zealand played in the 1860s, and where the wooden pavilion specially constructed for their visit still stands.
In sympathy with nearby residents, the new pavilion is only two-storeyed, and the stands are temporary, and there are no floodlights. The wind can howl though, and it is not only coming off the sea but the Antarctic, so the scene is not always as sylvan and heart-warming as it may appear on television during a British winter.
5. Galle (Sri Lanka)
The ground itself is anything but special, just bare utility and seats at odd angles. It is the view beyond which is matchless. Immediately in the foreground is the Fort, which the Portuguese opened for trading with Malacca and Batavia and beyond.
It is a World Heritage site so the original buildings - the factories as the warehouses were known - still stand unscathed, and the streets remain intimate. Here in this humidity is one of the ever fewer places in the world which religions co-habit side by side.
Then, if you are watching from the pavilion, turn your gaze from the Fort to the right, and westwards, and you will see a fishing boat bobbing home to the port which lies a few hundred yards to your left and where you can see the “catch of the day” - not in a cricket sense - lying on the pavements for sale.
4. Queen’s Park Oval (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago)
Other West Indian islands offer spectacular settings for Test grounds, like Barbados and St Lucia, St Vincent and Dominica, and the clarity of the unpolluted light at all of them is not to be taken for granted nowadays. But Queen’s Park Oval still takes the palm because of what it can offer in the foreground and background.
The stands and pavilion are pleasant enough but most vibrant is what goes on beneath them during a well-attended match: all the stalls, selling street food like curry goat and drinks of real fruit, a machete decapitating your coconut.
In the background is the Northern Range, uplifting the eyes and making them forget the violent strife in the streets of Trinidad’s capital. It is a combination to delight all the senses if Trini Posse are dancing in the party stand.
3. Newlands Cricket Ground (Cape Town, South Africa)
Smoke, but at least whitish smoke, still puffs from the brewery which sits between the railway station and the Newlands cricket ground. Otherwise the view is unsurpassable: Table Mountain beyond, often topped by icing which the cloud resembles.
The sides of the mountain are delectable too, the vegetation verdant in the gullies, before it gives way to sparser bush towards the summit. One of the world’s finest botanical gardens starts the process that grows into Table Mountain; and its mood alters during the day along with the background of sky behind it, so that it demands constant surveillance.
You might even think of Mussorgsky and Night on the Bare Mountain, if you miss the last cable car down.
2. Adelaide Oval (Australia)
The Oval has half-resisted the temptation to be transferred into a stadium, but only half. It depends from which end of the Oval you regard the ground. Seated at the end where the remains of the grass-banked Hill survives, it is a stadium, with a few skyscrapers of Adelaide city centre thrusting up behind, bespeaking Australia’s material wellbeing.
But if seated at the other end, with the River Torrens behind you, the prospect is delight-filled: a few Moreton Bay figs, the Hill topped by the scoreboard built in 1911-12 whose wooden planks still creak in the heat or wind, with St Peter’s Cathedral beyond.
What is more, if you are at the top of the stand at the River Torrens end, you can look to your right and see the Adelaide Hills, fairly bare and windswept now, but hinting at the valleys beyond where German settlers planted their vines.
1 . Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association Stadium (Dharamshala, India)
International cricket venues which are beautiful are becoming fewer and fewer, as the new ground is likely to be a stadium, a purpose-built concrete bowl surrounded by stands, perhaps with a roof over which it is impossible to see. But the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association has built a ground into the Himalayan hillside, at 5000 feet, which defies the modern trend. It is beautiful from both perspectives, close-up and afar.
Inside, the pavilion is in homely proportion to the whole, and has a red roof as bright as the robes of Buddhist monks who have clustered here around the Dalai Lama; and, on a less spiritual plane, the food stalls are clean and varied. The cricket field next door also lends to the rural feel, and these surroundings have not been deforested. Then, in the distance, the mountains - snow-capped in season - soar above and beyond the encampments of Tibetans in their endless exile, onwards and upwards to the roof of the world, encouraging flights of fancy and freedom.
