Craven Cottage

The first Craven Cottage was built in 1780 by William Craven, the sixth Baron Craven, close to where the Johnny Haynes Stand now stands; the woods around it had once been part of Anne Boleyn's hunting grounds. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of The Last Days of Pompeii, lived in the cottage, as did other moneyed tenants, until it burned down in May 1888. Fulham had used eight grounds before settling here.

When representatives of Fulham first came across the land in 1894 it was so overgrown that two years of work were needed before football could be played on it; the owners agreed to do the work in return for a proportion of the gate receipts. The first match there with any gate receipts was against Minerva in the Middlesex Senior Cup on 10 October 1896. The first stand followed shortly after — four wooden structures of some 250 seats each, described as looking like an orange box and nicknamed the rabbit hutch.

In 1904 London County Council grew concerned about safety and tried to have the ground closed. A court case in January 1905 ended with the hiring of Archibald Leitch, the Scottish architect who had made his name a few years earlier at Ibrox. For £15,000, a record for the time, Leitch built the pavilion — the Cottage itself — and the Stevenage Road Stand in his characteristic red brick.

An England–Wales match was played at the ground in 1907. In the early 1910s the Fulham director Henry Norris and his friend William Hall took over Arsenal, intending to merge the two clubs into a London superclub at the Cottage, a move largely motivated by Fulham's failure to gain promotion. The merger idea collapsed, as did a 1933 plan to replace the ground with an 80,000-capacity stadium, which failed mainly because of the Great Depression.

On 8 October 1938, 49,335 spectators watched Fulham play Millwall, the largest attendance the ground has held. Craven Cottage staged several matches at the 1948 Summer Olympics and is one of the last venues from those Games still standing.

Not until Fulham reached the top division in 1949 did further improvements follow. In 1962 they became the final side in the first division to erect floodlights. On Boxing Day 1963 Graham Leggat completed a hat-trick in under three minutes as Fulham beat Ipswich Town 10–1, a club record. The roof over the Hammersmith End, costing about £42,500, was financed by the £72,500 sale of Alan Mullery to Tottenham Hotspur in 1964.

The Riverside terracing, whose fans turned once a year to watch the Boat Race pass, was replaced in 1971–72 by a 4,200-seat stand costing £334,000, opened with a friendly against Benfica in February 1972 with Eusébio in the side. It was renamed after Eric Miller, a former vice-chairman who took his own life in 1977 while under investigation for fraud and embezzlement; the name reverted in the 1990s. On 8 May 1973 the ground took Northern Ireland's World Cup qualifier against Cyprus, moved from Belfast because of the Troubles and won 3–0. Fulham RLFC played rugby league at the Cottage from 1980 to 1984, drawing a crowd of 15,013 against Wakefield Trinity in February 1981.

Following the Taylor Report, the chairman Jimmy Hill tabled plans in 1996 for an all-seater stadium; they came to nothing, partly because of local residents' pressure groups, and Fulham reached the Premier League with standing areas still in the ground — the last club in the division to have them, eight years after terraces were outlawed at that level. The last league game before the move was against Leicester City on 27 April 2002, followed by two Intertoto Cup ties, before the club decamped to Loftus Road, home of QPR. Supporters set up Back to the Cottage, later the Fulham Supporters Trust, to press for a return.

Plans for £8 million of refurbishment were unveiled in December 2003, work began in January 2004, and Fulham returned to a 22,000-seat all-seater ground for a friendly against Watford on 10 July 2004. After the former England captain Johnny Haynes died in a car accident in October 2005, the club canvassed supporters and renamed the Stevenage Road Stand after him; that stand and the Cottage pavilion are Grade II listed. Fulham F.C., which owns and operates the ground, began rebuilding the Riverside Stand in the summer of 2019; that November the chairman Shahid Khan announced it would be known as Fulham Pier, a venue for use beyond match days. Capacity was cut to 19,000 for three seasons, and in March 2022 the club announced the rebuilt lower tier would open for 2022–23.