Maine Road

Plans to build Maine Road were first announced in May 1922, after Manchester City decided to leave Hyde Road, a ground with no room for expansion whose main stand had been severely damaged by fire in 1920. Two sites at Belle Vue in east Manchester were suggested and neither was deemed sufficient: to many City supporters east Manchester was regarded as the club's home and a move to Belle Vue seemed right, but the site ran to just 8 acres and the available lease of fifty years was judged too short. The club settled instead on Moss Side, a move to a larger stadium backed by the then manager, Ernest Mangnall. Many were disappointed that a south Manchester site had been chosen, and one City director, John Ayrton, resigned from the board later in the decade and helped to form a breakaway club, Manchester Central, which played at Belle Vue.

A 16.25 acre former brickworks on Maine Road was bought for £5,500. The road itself had been called Dog Kennel Lane until the 1870s, when it was renamed Maine Road after the Maine law at the insistence of the Temperance movement, which owned land along it and whose request the local authority accepted. Construction took 300 days at a total cost of £100,000, and the ground opened as one covered stand seating 10,000 with uncovered terracing on the other three sides and gentle curves connecting the corners. A story that a Gypsy had cursed the ground when officials evicted a Gypsy camp from the area attached itself to the site during building, the curse said to have been lifted on 28 December 1998; such tales are endemic to a number of Football League grounds and this one is likely an urban myth. The name was later given to a non-league football club as well: Maine Road FC, founded in 1955 by a group of Manchester City supporters and for a time headquartered at the social club adjoining the ground, plays in the North West Counties Football League Division One.

The first match at Maine Road was played on 25 August 1923, when 58,159 spectators watched Manchester City beat Sheffield United 2–1. The first alteration came in 1931, when the corner between the Main Stand and the Platt Lane end at the south of the ground was rebuilt to take a roof. It was the first of many: the layout and the capacity of the ground were varied repeatedly across its lifespan.

On 3 March 1934, 84,569 people watched Manchester City play Stoke City in the sixth round of the FA Cup, the highest attendance recorded for an English football club playing at its own stadium. Queues formed four hours before kick-off, and one journalist reported the ground packed two hours before the start. The turnstiles were closed with the attendance at roughly 85,000, some 3,000 short of what was thought to be the maximum the ground could hold. The visiting Stoke side included Stanley Matthews; City's included Frank Swift, Fred Tilson, Sam Cowan and Matt Busby, and City won 1–0. A larger crowd, 121,919, had watched the 1913 FA Cup final between Aston Villa and Sunderland at the Crystal Palace ground, but that was a neutral venue, which leaves the Maine Road figure as the record home attendance at a club ground for a domestic match.

Changes at the Platt Lane end in 1935 extended the terracing and roofed the full stand, marking the ground at its largest, a capacity estimated at 88,000. Further work was planned, then suspended when Manchester City were relegated from the First Division in 1938, and abandoned altogether when the Second World War broke out.

After the Second World War the stadium was shared with Manchester United, whose Old Trafford ground had been damaged during the Manchester Blitz. United paid City £5,000 per season plus a share of the gate receipts. The highest attendance for a league game at Maine Road belongs to that period: 83,260 watched Manchester United play Arsenal on 17 January 1948, a national record for a league fixture. United also used the ground for three of their home ties in the 1956–57 European Cup, until floodlights were installed at Old Trafford as UEFA required. The first European match played at Maine Road saw United beat the Belgian champions RSC Anderlecht 10–0 in the preliminary round, a competition record that stood for seventeen years.

Maine Road hosted two England internationals, a 3–0 defeat of Wales on 13 November 1946 and a 9–2 win over Northern Ireland on 16 November 1949, the latter England's first World Cup qualifier; a number of wartime internationals were played there as well. It staged the Rugby Football League Championship Final eleven times between 1938 and 1956, and the cross code challenge match between Wigan Rugby League and Bath rugby union. It held many FA Cup semi-finals, the last in April 1994, and the 1984 Football League Cup final replay, won 1–0 by Liverpool against Everton.

The ground earned its keep away from sport too. Scenes for the 1948 film Cup-tie Honeymoon were shot there, and it appeared again in the 2000 film There's Only One Jimmy Grimble and in the 2003 ITV drama The Second Coming. In June 1961 the American evangelist Billy Graham drew more than 100,000 people to the stadium over four nights of his UK tour. Of the many concerts staged there, the most high-profile was given in April 1996 by Oasis, avowed Manchester City supporters, and released afterwards as the video ...There and Then.

Floodlights were installed in 1953, and further development followed in 1957, prompted by the ground hosting FA Cup semi-finals in successive years. The side facing the Main Stand, until then generally known as the Popular Side, was rebuilt and named the Kippax after a nearby street, and across the 1960s and 1970s it became the part of the ground where the club's most vociferous supporters gathered. Benches were installed at the Platt Lane end in 1963, which gave Maine Road more seats than any other English club ground at the time. The next major work came in the 1970s with the cantilevered North Stand, which stayed in place until the ground closed. Ambitious improvement plans drawn up in the 1980s were shelved under financial pressure after the Main Stand roof had been replaced at a cost of £1 million.

By 1990 parts of the ground were becoming outdated, and the Taylor Report of January that year required it to become all-seater. The Platt Lane stand was demolished in 1992 and replaced by the all-seater Umbro Stand, which incorporated executive boxes and opened in March 1993; its name reverted to the Platt Lane Stand in 1997, when Kappa replaced Umbro as City's kit suppliers. Standing came to an end in May 1994 with the demolition of the Kippax Street Terrace, which, unusually for an all-standing area, ran along the side of the pitch rather than behind a goal. The last match played with standing permitted was a 2–2 draw with Chelsea on 30 April 1994; immediately before demolition the terrace held 18,300.

The three-tier stand built in its place took nearly 14,000 spectators and cost £16 million, four times the turnover of the club according to the then chairman, Francis Lee. On its completion in October 1995 it was the tallest stand in the country, and it was the second phase of a five-part development plan costed at £40 million that would have raised the stadium's capacity to 45,024. The club abandoned the plan after relegation from the Premier League in 1996 and from Division One two years later. The new stand also underlined how haphazardly the ground had grown, all four sides differing in height and in style of construction.

Renewed proposals to expand Maine Road to an all-seated 45,000 were dropped in favour of a move to the City of Manchester Stadium, built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The final competitive match was played on 11 May 2003, a Premiership fixture against Southampton, with tickets changing hands upwards of £250 and a crowd of 34,957 close to filling a ground whose capacity at closure was 35,150. City lost 1–0, Michael Svensson scoring the stadium's last goal, and the day ended with performances by Badly Drawn Boy and Doves.

City's own final goal at the ground had been scored three weeks earlier, on 21 April 2003, by Marc-Vivien Foé in a 3–0 win over Sunderland. Sixty-six days later, on 26 June, Foé died of an undetected heart condition while playing for Cameroon at the 2003 Confederations Cup. An auction of the ground's fixtures and fittings in July 2003 raised £100,000, which was given to community projects in Moss Side, then some way into a lengthy regeneration. The two penalty spots and the centre spot were thought the most desirable mementoes, but all three had been cut out of the grass before the sale, which ran for seven hours and drew 1,000 supporters.

Other sports teams had been talked of as successors. Stockport County once expressed an interest in moving there from Edgeley Park, and in December 2000 the rugby union club Sale Sharks was offered a lease, but none of the proposals came to anything, and some former City players said they were dismayed the stadium had not been converted for mixed sporting use. Demolition began in late 2003 and took around ten months. Two years later approval was given for a housing development of 474 homes on the site, where a public art display now commemorates the ground: a circular plate, half open, standing for the centre spot and for the development that has risen over it.