Hillsborough Stadium

During the 1898-99 season Sheffield Wednesday were told the Olive Grove land they rented was wanted for railway expansion, and had to find a new ground. James Willis Dixon of Hillsborough House, owner of the silversmiths James Dixon & Sons, offered a ten-acre site at Owlerton, part of the Hillsborough House estate his family were selling off. The club bought it for £5,000 plus costs, and soil was dumped at both ends to level the dandelion-covered meadow.

Wednesday's 2,000-capacity Olive Grove stand was carried to the new site and joined by a new stand holding 3,000. The first match came on 2 September 1899 against Chesterfield, kicked off by the Lord Mayor of Sheffield William Clegg, a former Wednesday player; Chesterfield's Herbert Munday scored the ground's first goal and Wednesday won 5-1.

Record profits after the 1912-13 season paid for a new south stand by Archibald Leitch, with 5,600 seats and terracing at the front, ready for the FA Cup tie against Notts County on 1 October 1913. At the second-round replay of 4 February 1914, watched by a record home crowd of 43,000, the new retaining wall at the Penistone Road end collapsed, injuring 70 and suspending the match while the casualties were taken to the infirmary.

The ground was Owlerton Stadium until 1914, when it took the name Hillsborough from the newly created parliamentary constituency. Its first international followed on 10 April 1920, when 25,536 saw England beat Scotland 5-4. The highest attendance recorded here came on 17 February 1934, when 72,841 watched an FA Cup fifth-round tie against Manchester City.

Demolition of the North Stand began in 1960 and a £150,000 replacement went up, designed by the local firm Husband & Co. It was only the second stand in the country with a cantilever roof, after Scunthorpe United's Old Show Ground, and the first to run the pitch's full length. Stanley Rous of the Football Association opened it on 23 August 1961, its 10,008 seats taking the ground's seating from 9,000 to 16,000. A celebration match on 22 October 1961 brought Santos of Brazil, Pele scoring in their 4-2 win.

Hillsborough was a venue for the 1966 World Cup, hosting first-round matches and a quarter-final in which West Germany beat Uruguay 4-0. On 26 December 1979, 49,309 watched Wednesday beat Sheffield United 4-0, still the record attendance for a third-tier match in Britain.

On 15 April 1989, at an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, 97 Liverpool supporters were crushed to death. Official investigations criticised Sheffield Wednesday for failing to act on earlier incidents, particularly the 1981 FA Cup semi-final, that had shown the potential for crushing at the ground. The Leppings Lane end held no valid safety certificate; it had not been updated since 1979.

The Taylor Report's recommendations brought safety changes to grounds across the United Kingdom, among them the requirement for clubs in the top two English divisions to have all-seater stadiums and the removal of perimeter fencing, which at Hillsborough had been installed only a few years before the disaster. The terraces here were converted to seats over the following four years, the Kop last in 1993, and the pitchside fences were replaced with low barriers that allowed people onto the playing surface in an emergency. A memorial near the main entrance on Parkside Road was unveiled on the tenth anniversary, 15 April 1999, to "the 96 men, women, and children who tragically died and the countless people whose lives were changed forever".

A £7 million redevelopment for Euro 1996 added an upper Grandstand tier of 3,077 seats to the South Stand, with a new roof and 30 executive boxes, and a footbridge over the River Don was built that year to reach it. On 25 June 2007 the Don burst its banks in severe weather and the whole ground flooded under several feet of water, damaging changing rooms, kitchens, offices and the club shop; repairs cost millions and the clean-up took months, though the fixtures were only slightly affected, the floods falling in the close season. A memorial to the flood was unveiled under the South Stand on 25 June 2008.

Sheffield Wednesday own the ground. Planning permission for a £22 million upgrade taking capacity to 44,825 was granted on 20 October 2009, but the scheme was shelved after England lost the 2018 World Cup bid and had not begun by November 2018. On 29 July 2025 Sheffield City Council issued a prohibition notice cutting the North Stand's capacity to zero.