St Andrew's

Small Heath Alliance, the club that became Birmingham City, played its first home games on waste ground off Arthur Street in Bordesley Green, very close to the plot where St Andrew's would later be laid out. In 1876 the team moved temporarily to a fenced-off field in Ladypool Road, Sparkbrook, with room for an estimated 3,000; because the field was enclosed, admission could be charged. A year later came a rented field in Small Heath, on the eastern edge of Birmingham's built-up area just north of the main road to Coventry. That ground, known as Muntz Street, had four sides of open terracing, a small covered wooden stand and a changing room for the players, and held roughly 10,000 when it first opened. Raising the height of the terracing lifted capacity to around 30,000, which still could not meet demand: the attendance at the 1905 match against local rivals Aston Villa was officially recorded as 28,000, with several thousand more getting in over walls and through forced turnstiles. The landlords would neither sell the freehold nor permit major extensions, and with the board reckoning that staying at Muntz Street cost the club £2,000 a year, the directors began looking for another site.

Harry Morris, one of those directors, found it about three-quarters of a mile from Muntz Street towards the city centre: seven and a half acres in Bordesley bounded by Cattell Road, Coventry Road, Tilton Road, Garrison Lane and the railway, near St Andrew's church and once worked as a brickworks. Morris called the land itself "a wilderness of stagnant water and muddy slopes", while the Sporting Mail judged it "very favourably situated for obtaining easy communication with the city and many of the suburbs", predicting that it would be served by an excellent service of electric trams and reckoning a railway station close at hand to be within the bounds of possibility. The club took the land on a 21-year lease and handed the surveying and engineering to Harry Pumfrey, a local carpenter with no qualifications, whose plans were reckoned to be work "which would have done credit to the most expensive professional architect". Thomas Turley, a director and a builder, acted as clerk of works, and keeping the job in-house is estimated to have saved the club more than £2,000 in professional fees. Tradition holds that Gypsies evicted from the site before work began laid a hundred-year curse on the club; Gypsies are known to have camped nearby, but no contemporary evidence records any eviction by the club. Building started in February 1906.

Artesian springs kept the land flooded and had to be drained and blocked off under tons of rubble before soil could be laid on top. Height for the terracing on the Coventry Road side was raised by the cheapest means available: the club offered the site as a tip, and local people paid it a total of £800 for dumping an estimated 100,000 loads of rubbish. The bank that resulted was called the Spion Kop from the beginning, stood 110 terraces high at its highest point and was reported to hold 48,000 spectators at sixpence a head. On the Garrison Lane side the Grandstand ran 123 yards, with 6,000 seats priced from a shilling to two shillings and covered standing room for 5,000 in front of it. Beneath it were refreshment and changing rooms, a training area with a plunge bath, a billiard room given by the brewery magnate Sir John Holder, and the boardroom and offices the club had until then kept in premises in the city centre. Another 4,000 could stand behind the goal at the railway end, and the whole was put at 75,000 spectators for a construction cost of some £10,000.

Sir John Holder opened St Andrew's on 26 December 1906, for a First Division fixture against Middlesbrough. Heavy snow had fallen overnight and dozens of volunteers, members of the club's board among them, worked all morning to clear the pitch; the game kicked off an hour late and finished goalless in front of 32,000 spectators. The editorial in the Birmingham Daily Post the next day took the turnout as vindication, holding that "the fact that so many spectators attended under such adverse conditions augurs well for the step that the directors have taken", and that the directors were "to be congratulated in having provided their supporters with a ground second to none in the country".

The Football Association gave the new ground the 1907 FA Cup semi-final between The Wednesday and Woolwich Arsenal, won 3-1 by Wednesday, who went on to take the trophy. It was the first FA Cup tie played at St Andrew's, Birmingham having lost their own opening match away from home. Three further semi-finals followed before the Second World War, in 1911, 1924 and 1934, and in 1921 the club bought the freehold of the ground at a price believed to have been under £7,000. Roofs went up over the Kop and Railway End terraces during the 1930s, and official capacity stood at 68,000 at the start of the 1938-39 season. The largest league crowd the ground has held, 60,250, came against Aston Villa in the First Division on 23 November 1935; the record for any match was set at the fifth-round FA Cup tie against Everton on 11 February 1939, recorded variously as 66,844 and as 67,341.

Football was never the ground's only business. Small Heath Harriers, the athletics club whose headquarters had been at Muntz Street, trained at St Andrew's until the 1920s, and before competitive football resumed after the First World War a Scottish Football League XI beat their English counterparts there by three goals to one, the English side including the Birmingham players Frank Womack and Billy Morgan. Through that war the club had supported the war effort by allowing the ground to be used as a rifle range for military training.

The Second World War closed the ground altogether. All outdoor sport was banned by the Government at the outbreak until the safety implications could be assessed, and when football resumed a few weeks later Birmingham's Chief Constable ordered St Andrew's to stay shut because it lay close to air-raid targets such as the BSA munitions factories. The closure was raised in Parliament in November 1939, but the Home Secretary felt unable to intervene. By March 1940, when St Andrew's had for some time been the only football ground in England still closed, the Chief Constable bowed to public pressure, and a crowd of 13,241 saw Birmingham's first home game in more than six months.

In 1941 the ground took 20 direct hits from Luftwaffe bombing, which destroyed the roof of the Kop, badly damaged the Railway End and forced the team to play elsewhere. That made it a surprising choice of venue for a wartime international between England and Wales, played with tickets sold in advance and the crowd limited to 25,000 on safety grounds. Three months later the Main Stand, then in use as a temporary National Fire Service station, burned down after a fireman intending to damp down a brazier mistook a bucket of petrol for water. The club's records and equipment went with it, and "not so much as a lead pencil was saved from the wreckage". The team returned to the ground in 1943.

The highest average attendance St Andrew's has known over a league season, 38,821, came in the First Division in 1948-49. The replacement Main Stand followed in the early 1950s, completed in 1954 with a propped cantilever roof that meant fewer pillars blocking the view of the pitch, and floodlights were officially switched on for a friendly against Borussia Dortmund in October 1956. By the early 1960s a stand of the same design had gone up at the Railway End, the Kop had a new roof and the Tilton Road end was covered for the first time, and a scoreboard and clock were installed at the City end in memory of Jeff Hall, the Birmingham and England player who died of polio during the 1958-59 season. In the 1970s the Asda chain offered to share the cost of a new stand as part of a supermarket development on land behind the Kop left vacant by slum clearance, but commercial rivals opposed the scheme and it fell through.

Other sports had the run of the ground in the same years. Dick Turpin retained his British and Empire middleweight title there against Albert Finch in 1949, with his brothers Jack and Randolph, a future world champion, on the undercard, and Henry Cooper kept his British and Empire heavyweight title against Johnny Prescott in 1965. England B beat Scotland B under the floodlights in front of nearly 40,000 in 1957, and in 1960 the South African touring rugby union side beat a Midland Counties XV by 16 points to 5 on a muddy pitch before a crowd of 17,000. St Andrew's also saw the first use of a penalty shootout to decide an FA Cup match, when Birmingham beat Stoke City 4-3 on penalties to take third place in the 1971-72 competition.

The ground meanwhile fell into disrepair. Rioting marred the last home game of the promotion season of 1984-85, against Leeds United, and culminated in the death of a 15-year-old boy, Ian Hambridge, when a wall collapsed on him; a memorial plaque was eventually placed near the spot. The riot fell on the same day as the Bradford City stadium fire, and events at St Andrew's were taken into the remit of the Popplewell inquiry into safety at sports grounds. In response to that inquiry and to the later Taylor Report the capacity was cut to 26,000, though it was accepted that the stadium had to be brought up to modern standards; the lowest average attendance for a league season, 6,289, was recorded in the Second Division in 1988-89. The club chairman David Gold recalled his first visit, in March 1993: "It was a shock ... Only two-thirds of the bulbs on the floodlights were working and the Football League had threatened action if we didn't do something to improve the lights ... This First Division club was penniless and near to extinction."

New owners took the club out of administration in 1993 and began a six-year programme that rebuilt every part of the ground except the Main Stand and converted it to an all-seater stadium in line with the Taylor Report. Relegation to the Third Division released the club from the report's 1994 deadline for that conversion, but the new owner David Sullivan carried on with the £4.5 million development as planned. The Kop and Tilton Road terraces came down after the last home game of the 1993-94 season, fans helping by carrying off a significant proportion as souvenirs, and the old rubbish tip beneath the Kop that had earned the club £800 in 1906 cost £250,000 to decontaminate. Seven thousand seats in the Tilton Road Stand were ready for the start of the new season. Once the Kop Stand was finished, Baroness Trumpington formally re-opened the stadium in November 1994 on behalf of the Department of National Heritage, unveiling a commemorative plaque and presenting a cheque for £2.5 million from the Football Trust before a friendly against Aston Villa watched by 20,000. Planning permission for an all-seater Railway Stand was granted in March 1995, but a dispute over land owned by Railtrack held the work up and the stand opened only in 1999.

The record crowd for the rebuilt ground, 29,588, was set against Arsenal in the Premier League on 22 November 2003. A proposal came the following year for a sports village elsewhere in the city, taking in a 55,000-capacity City of Birmingham Stadium, other sports and leisure facilities and a super casino, to be financed jointly by Birmingham City Council, the club through the sale of St Andrew's, and the casino group Las Vegas Sands; it depended on the government issuing a super-casino licence under the Gambling Act 2005 and on Birmingham being chosen as the venue, and neither followed. A memorial clock to Jeff Hall, replacing the original lost in the rebuilding of the 1990s, was unveiled above the Main Stand in September 2008 by his team-mates Alex Govan and Gil Merrick, and from the 2009-10 season the Railway Stand was renamed the Gil Merrick Stand after the club's appearance record-holder and former manager.

In 2013 Birmingham City Council approved the Supporters' Trust's application to list St Andrew's as an asset of community value under the Localism Act 2011, a designation for land whose main use furthers the social wellbeing or social interests of the local community; it obliges the owner to notify the council of any proposed sale and provides a six-month moratorium in which community groups may prepare a bid of their own. The stadium was renamed the St Andrew's Trillion Trophy Stadium for sponsorship in June 2018, a name it carried until 2021. During the 2018-19 season, with the club in breach of the English Football League's profitability and sustainability regulations, the ground was sold for £22.8 million to Birmingham City Stadium Ltd, a new company wholly owned by the club's parent Birmingham Sports Holdings, and was to be leased back to the club at £1.25 million a year for 25 years. Coventry City played their home matches at St Andrew's in 2019-20 and 2020-21, having failed to agree terms with their landlords, Wasps RFC, to stay at the Ricoh Arena.

An annual survey during the 2020-21 season found that repairs were needed to remedy the effects of water ingress on both the Kop and Tilton Road Stands; the upper Tilton did not reopen until a month into the 2021-22 season and the upper Kop six weeks after that. Work to demolish and rebuild the lower tiers, shut by what proved to be asbestos-related damage, began during the 2022-23 season and stopped in mid-August when the main contractors, Buckingham Group, filed for administration; Mace Consult took over in mid-September, and both lower tiers were open for the last match of November with the western end of the Kop still incomplete. In January 2024 the club's owners, Shelby Companies, renamed the ground St. Andrew's @ Knighthead Park under what they called "the largest commercial agreement in the club's history", which Tom Wagner, chairman of both the club and Shelby's parent company Knighthead, described as the first step in a plan to create a "Sports Quarter" in Birmingham. The ground seats 27,535 and has been Birmingham City's home for more than a century.