The Den, Cold Blow Lane & The Den

Millwall Football Club was formed in the Millwall area of the Isle of Dogs in 1885, and the Den is the sixth ground the club has occupied since. It played at Glengall Road from 1885, at the Lord Nelson Ground from 1886, at the Athletic Grounds from 1890 and at North Greenwich from 1901. In 1910 it settled at the ground that came to be known as the Old Den, off Cold Blow Lane, and stayed there for 83 years. The last match played there was on 8 May 1993, after which the club moved a quarter of a mile to its new home.

The New Den, as it was first called to distinguish it from its predecessor, was the first new all-seater stadium in England to be completed after the Taylor Report on the Hillsborough disaster of 1989. After the chairman Reg Burr judged that redeveloping the Old Den as an all-seater ground would not be viable, he announced in 1990 that Millwall would move to a new stadium in the Senegal Fields area of south Bermondsey. The site had previously carried housing, a church and the Senegal Fields playgrounds. The design was worked out with crowd management in mind, the escape routes kept short and direct, a concern sharpened by the club's crowd problems at the Old Den. A seating capacity of between 25,000 and 30,000 was originally planned, but the club opted to wait and the figure was held to just over 20,000.

The £16 million stadium was opened on 4 August 1993 by John Smith, then leader of the Labour Party and of the Opposition, before a friendly against Sporting CP that Sporting won 2–1. It was the first new stadium constructed for a professional football team in London since 1937. Its all-seated capacity is 20,146, restricted in practice to about 18,100 to allow for segregation of visiting supporters and for crowd safety measures.

Millwall finished third in Division One in 1993–94, their first season at the new ground and their highest placing since relegation from the top flight four years earlier, but a playoff defeat ended their hopes of Premier League football. They went down to Division Two in 1996 and did not win promotion from that level until 2001. In 2002 they came close again, finishing fourth and once more losing in the playoffs.

The club reached the FA Cup final for the first time in 2004 and, despite a 3–0 defeat by Manchester United, qualified for European competition for the first time in its history. Millwall's two seasons in the old First Division, from 1988, had been played at the previous stadium, and the Den has yet to stage Premier League football. Relegation came in 2006 and again in 2015, promotion in 2010 and 2017.

A boxing match was staged at the Den in 1994, when the local fighter Michael Bentt lost his WBO World Heavyweight Championship to Herbie Hide. It was Bentt's last fight; he was rushed to hospital and told he could never box again after suffering brain injuries in the defeat. On 1 May 2006 the ground held the FA Women's Cup final, Arsenal L.F.C. beating Leeds United L.F.C. 5–0. Four international matches have been played there: England Women were beaten 1–0 by Germany Women on 8 March 1998, Ghana drew 1–1 with Senegal on 21 August 2007, Jamaica and Nigeria drew 0–0 on 11 February 2009, and Australia lost 4–3 to Ecuador on 5 March 2014, a match in which the former Millwall player Tim Cahill scored two of Australia's goals and became his country's all-time top scorer. On 5 September 2015 the ground turned to rugby league, Wigan Warriors beating the Catalans Dragons 42–16 in a Super League Super 8s match watched by 8,101 people.

The Den also took the Samaritans Celebrity Soccer Sixes on 18 May 2008, the first time the event had not been hosted by a Premier League club. Around 150 celebrities took part, among them McFly, Tony Hadley, Amy Winehouse and the former Millwall favourite Terry Hurlock, and the dance act Faithless beat Babyshambles 3–2 in the final.

On 20 January 2011 the East Stand was renamed the Dockers Stand, in tribute to the club's early history and to the Thames dockers who made up its support. The South Stand is known as the Cold Blow Lane Stand, after the road that led into the Old Den, and the West Stand was renamed for Barry Kitchener, Millwall's longest-serving player; it holds the family enclosure, the press box and the executive seats. The North Stand is given over to visiting supporters.

Plans submitted in 2012 for the surrounding land would have seen the stadium demolished for redevelopment. In September 2016 Lewisham Council approved a compulsory purchase order on land around the Den that Millwall rented, as part of a major redevelopment of the area as New Bermondsey. The scheme was contested: the developer, Renewal, was controlled by offshore companies whose ownership was unclear, and the club and the local community took it to be profiteering, since it would demolish existing homes and businesses along with Millwall's car park and the Millwall Community Trust to make room for up to 2,400 private homes, with no council housing and less than 15 per cent of the total classed as affordable. Millwall had submitted its own regeneration plans, centred on the football club, but the council voted for Renewal's.

In December 2016 Private Eye reported that Renewal had been founded by a former leader of Lewisham Council and a former senior officer, suggesting potential bias, and that the decision to approve Renewal's plans may have been taken as long ago as 2013, despite PricewaterhouseCoopers having been unable to carry out due diligence because access to information and to management at Renewal, a company registered in the Isle of Man, was "poor" and "limited".

Lewisham Council terminated the conditional land sale agreement with Renewal in October 2019, ensuring the stadium's future and allowing Millwall to prepare development plans of its own. In February 2020 the club announced a phased expansion, adding upper tiers behind the existing seating to take the Den gradually to 34,000 seats. Renewal returned in June 2021 with proposals for 3,500 homes in towers of up to 44 storeys over 15 years, the first phase putting 600 flats into three 31-storey blocks behind Surrey Canal Road, 35 per cent of them meeting an affordable requirement, and including completion of New Bermondsey railway station, begun in 2012 and stalled when the earlier development was held up. The ground belongs to Millwall Football Club.