White Hart Lane

Tottenham Hotspur played from 1882 on public land at Tottenham Marshes, where no admission could be charged and crowds of a few thousand yielded no gate receipts. In 1888 the club rented a pitch at Northumberland Park for £17 a year and charged 3d a game. At a match there against Woolwich Arsenal in 1898, watched by a record 15,000, the refreshment stand collapsed under fans on its roof, prompting the club to start looking for a new ground.

In 1899 Spurs moved onto a former Charringtons nursery behind the White Hart pub, leased on condition the club guarantee crowds of 1,000 for first-team matches and 500 for the reserves. John Over, groundsman at a local cricket club, cleared the greenhouses and laid the pitch. The ground was never officially named, and how the name of the street on the far side of the High Road attached itself remains unclear. The opening friendly on 4 September 1899 drew about 5,000 and £115 in receipts, Notts County's Tommy McCairns scoring first before David Copeland's hat-trick made it 4–1.

A share issue let the club buy the freehold for £8,900 in 1905, and £2,600 more bought land at the Paxton Road end, where a new bank took capacity to 40,000. Spurs entered the Second Division in 1908, beating Wolverhampton Wanderers 3–0 in their first league game at the ground. The stands were then rebuilt over two and a half decades to designs by the stadium architect Archibald Leitch, beginning with the two-tiered West Stand — 5,300 seats over a standing paddock, a mock-Tudor gable carrying the club's name, and the largest stand at a British football ground when it opened on 11 September 1909. A bronze fighting cockerel, cast by William James Scott, went up on its roof the same year.

During the First World War the Ministry of War took the stadium over and turned the East Stand into a factory making gas masks and gunnery equipment. The 1921 FA Cup win provided the money for a covered two-tier terrace at Paxton Road, matched at Park Lane in 1923; boxing was staged here from 1922. In 1934 the club spent £60,000 rebuilding the East Stand, seating 4,983 above and over 18,700 standing below, among them the raised terrace fans called The Shelf, the only raised terracing in the English league. Capacity now reached nearly 80,000, and the stand opened on 22 September 1934 against Aston Villa.

In 1935 the ground hosted England against Nazi Germany, a fixture that drew protests from Jewish groups; England won 3–0. On 5 March 1938, 75,038 packed in for an FA Cup tie against Sunderland, the record attendance at the ground. During the Second World War Spurs shared it with Arsenal, whose Highbury had been requisitioned as an Air Raid Precautions centre. Floodlights arrived in 1953. Attendances averaged over 53,000 in 1961, the Double-winning year.

The old West Stand came down in November 1980, replaced by an Ernest Atherden design with 6,500 seats and 72 executive boxes that opened on 6 February 1982 with a 6–1 win over Wolverhampton Wanderers and a hat-trick from Ricky Villa. Costs rose from £3.5 million to £6 million, leaving the club, already paying to rebuild the team, in financial difficulty. A refurbishment that put executive boxes into the upper part of The Shelf, over the objections of fans, opened on 18 October 1989, its cost doubled to over £8 million.

All the perimeter fencing was removed on 18 April 1989 for safety reasons, three days after the Hillsborough disaster in which 97 Liverpool supporters were fatally injured, most crushed against perimeter fencing; the fencing at the Lane had crushed Spurs fans during a cup tie in 1981. Following the Taylor Report of 1990, seating replaced the standing terraces, the South Stand was rebuilt by March 1995 with Football Trust money, and a second tier on the Paxton Road stand in 1998 left a capacity of 36,240. Michael Watson collapsed with a near-fatal brain injury after his bout with Chris Eubank there on 21 September 1991.

Corner sections of the North and East stands came down in 2016 so the new stadium could be built alongside; with capacity below that required for European ties, Spurs played their 2016–17 European home games at Wembley. On 14 May 2017 White Hart Lane held its final match, a 2–1 Premier League win over Manchester United with goals from Victor Wanyama and Harry Kane, and the last goal at the ground scored by Wayne Rooney. It had staged 2,533 competitive Spurs matches in 118 years. Demolition began the following day and was complete by August 2017.