Celtic Park

Celtic was formed in November 1887, and within six months of the club's formation a volunteer workforce had built the original Celtic Park at the north-east junction of Springfield Road and London Road in Parkhead. Its opening game was a match between Hibernian and Cowlairs. Celtic played their own first match there on 28 May 1888, against Rangers, and won 5–2. On 28 March 1891 the ground took a British Home Championship match between Scotland and Ireland. The landlord then raised the annual rent from £50 to £450. Celtic were forced to leave the ground their own volunteers had built, in 1892.

The replacement was built in a disused brickyard at Janefield Street, 200 yards from the old ground. The first turf was brought from County Donegal and laid by the Irish patriot Michael Davitt, who planted it with shamrocks and recited a verse saying the turf would "take root and flourish"; it was stolen soon afterwards. A journalist wrote that the move was like "leaving the graveyard to enter paradise", which led to the ground being nicknamed Paradise, a name it still carries. The new Celtic Park opened on 20 August 1892 with a match against Renton. A writer in the Athletic News called it the best ground in Britain at the time, a title for which it may only have been challenged by Everton's Goodison Park. It drew record gate receipts at once, and an attendance of 45,107 for the Scotland against England game in the 1894 British Home Championship. Celtic bought the site outright in 1897 for £100,000.

The ground began as terracing holding roughly 40,000, an elongated oval on the pattern of Hampden Park, with a running track and a concrete cycling track laid around the edge of the pitch and a pavilion and seated stand on the northern side. An experimental floodlit match was played on Christmas Day 1893 and failed, the ball repeatedly striking the lamps that had been hung over the pitch on wiring. In 1894 Celtic built what was the first press box at any football stadium in Britain, set high on the main stand. Later in the decade the club director James Grant financed an enclosed windowed stand on the south side of the pitch, completed in 1899 and raised on stilts; spectators watched from padded seats through sliding windows, having climbed four flights of stairs to reach them, and the windows frequently steamed up.

In May 1904 a fire destroyed the older north grandstand and badly damaged the pavilion beside it, which prompted Celtic to buy the newer Grant Stand outright; the north enclosure was rebuilt within a year. By 1927 the Grant Stand itself had become unsafe and was demolished, replaced in the summer of 1929 by a single-tier Main Stand designed by Duncan and Kerr, which cost £35,000 and gave 4,800 seats. It was smaller and less ornate than the Main Stand at Ibrox, though it shared with it a pedimented roof gable over the press box. Before it was finished, the old pavilion across the field — dating from the ground's construction in 1892, and only partly destroyed in 1904 despite contemporary reports that it had been "reduced to cinders" in that blaze — burned down entirely in March 1929, taking with it some of the club's old records and photographs, the trophies being stored elsewhere. Celtic played out the rest of the 1928–29 season at nearby Shawfield Stadium, reciprocating an arrangement of 1914 when Clyde had suffered similar damage to their own ground, and had to replace the roof of the stand next to the pavilion, which afterwards became known as the "Hayshed".

The rebuilt Celtic Park was only the third biggest ground in Glasgow, but it held more than any club stadium in England. The record attendance for a Celtic match there was set by an Old Firm derby against Rangers on New Year's Day 1938; some accounts give the crowd as 92,000, though contemporary sources suggest about 83,500.

Before the First World War the ground worked as a general arena as much as a football pitch. It staged the first composite rules shinty-hurling match played in Scotland, in 1897, and in the same year the only World Cycling Championship ever held in Scotland. Track and field meetings were held every summer. Rugby league was first played in Scotland at Celtic Park, in a game of 1909 between a Northern Rugby Football Union representative side and the touring Australians, and on 21 June 1913 the ground held the quarter-final of the All-Ireland Hurling Championship between Kilkenny and Glasgow. Open-air Masses were said there, and a parade was staged for the coronation of King George V. Like many football grounds, Celtic Park was used for recruitment drives during the First World War, one of which included a demonstration of trench warfare. The first pukka speedway meeting in Scotland was run there on 28 April 1928; twelve meetings were held in all before the venture closed that July, although some of them may have taken place at the neighbouring Nelson Recreation Ground.

Substantial improvements were made between 1957 and 1971, partly on the back of the success Celtic had under the management of Jock Stein. A roof went up over the back of the western "Celtic End" terrace in 1957 and floodlights were installed in 1959, first used on 12 October in a friendly against Wolves. The northern Hayshed terrace, by then known as the Jungle, was concreted in 1966 and given a new roof, and in 1967 the eastern "Rangers End" terrace was roofed to the same design as the Rangers End at Hampden Park. That work left Celtic with more covered terracing than any stadium in Britain apart from Wembley, in an overall capacity of 80,000 that still contained only 4,800 seats, all of them in the Main Stand. Another 3,900 seats were fitted in the Main Stand paddock in 1971, the year a new Main Stand roof was raised at a cost of £250,000 on a "goalpost" frame whose top girder ran 97.5 metres. The design was flawed: it sheltered the paddock seats poorly, and retractable columns had to be added to steady it against high winds or heavy snow. Celtic sued the designers and won damages.

The Safety of Sports Grounds Act 1975 cut the capacity to 56,500, after which the club extended the terracing to bring it back up to 67,000. In 1986 £1 million was spent replacing the western terrace roof with a replica of the eastern one designed nearly twenty years before, and in the club's centenary year of 1988 the Main Stand's original red brick facade was replaced and lounges and offices installed. Terracing still dominated the ground, in contrast to other major British stadia and to Ibrox in particular, where seated capacity had been increased. That left Celtic badly placed when the Taylor Report required major clubs to hold all-seater stadia by August 1994.

Celtic were heavily in debt in the early 1990s and had been commercially outgrown by Rangers. The board prevaricated in response to the Taylor Report, divided among itself. The director Brian Dempsey proposed a development on land he controlled at Robroyston and was opposed by his fellow directors Michael Kelly and Chris White, who had him removed from the board. In April 1992 the club unveiled a £100 million scheme for a 52,000-seat stadium on industrial waste ground at Cambuslang, of which a first phase would have seated only 32,000; the site would have needed decontamination, contradictory statements were issued about the ownership structure, and it was never clear how Celtic or their partner Superstadia would raise the money. Outline planning permission came in May 1993, by which time the first phase could not be ready before 1995. As a stop-gap the club put 5,033 seats into the Jungle at the end of the 1992–93 season for £350,000, hoping for a special dispensation, and the seating of the Jungle caused an emotional reaction among supporters: with Hampden being redeveloped, the 1993 Scottish Cup final between Rangers and Aberdeen was to be played at Celtic Park, which would have left Rangers fans occupying the Jungle for its last competitive game, so a friendly between veteran Celtic and Manchester United players was arranged to give the Celtic support the last use of it. In February 1994 the board claimed to have £20 million in place from the Swiss financial institution Gefinor, which denied both the funding and any contact with the club. The Bank of Scotland then demanded a £1 million reduction in the overdraft, putting Celtic under threat of bankruptcy, and with minutes to spare before the Bank's deadline the board capitulated and sold control to the Scots-Canadian businessman Fergus McCann.

McCann discarded the Cambuslang scheme and set about bringing Celtic Park itself into line with the Taylor Report. Seating the surviving terraces would have left a capacity of 34,000 — more than Celtic's average attendance over the previous six seasons — but McCann believed the club could fill a far larger ground and chose to build what amounted to a new stadium. In the summer of 1994 the Jungle and the East and West terracings were demolished, leaving only the structure of the Main Stand, and the almost-new Jungle seats were used to refresh the Main Stand's own seating. Celtic played the 1994–95 season at Hampden Park at a cost of £500,000 in rent. Over £26 million was raised in two share issues: £12.3 million in a rights issue, of which McCann invested £9.4 million, and £14 million in a public offering taken up by 10,000 ordinary supporters. Season ticket sales rose from 7,000 to 26,000.

Detailed plans were settled in December 1994 for a 60,000-seat ground in three phases. The North Stand was designed by Percy Johnson-Marshall Associates, engineered by Hutter Jennings Titchmarsh and built by Miller Construction; Celtic Park reopened with a friendly against Newcastle on 5 August 1995, the new 26,970-capacity North Stand and the existing 7,850-capacity Main Stand supplemented by a temporary 2,800-seat structure on the old West Terracing. The 13,006-capacity East Stand opened in August 1996, the South West Corner in February 1998, and the Jock Stein Stand on the West Terracing site in August 1998 with a match against Liverpool, adding a further 13,006 seats and bringing the ground to 60,411. The second and third phases were built by Barr Construction, and the whole rebuild, which made Celtic Park the biggest club stadium in Britain, cost £40 million. In 1998–99 the average attendance was 59,224 and season ticket sales passed 53,000, the highest in Britain at the time. The North Stand had to be squeezed between the pitch and the Eastern Necropolis, part of its upper tier cantilevered over the graveyard and fourteen internal pillars used to hold the roof in place of at least £1 million of additional steelwork; local residents objected to the shadow cast over the cemetery, and Celtic paid £10,000 in compensation to householders who had been promised open space "from the centre of the earth to the sky". Janefield Street has been closed to the public since the redevelopment.

The East Stand was renamed in 2000 after the Lisbon Lions, the Celtic side that won the 1967 European Cup final, the ceremony falling a few days after a Scottish Cup tie had to be postponed when strong winds damaged the stand's guttering. Statues of Brother Walfrid, Jimmy Johnstone, Jock Stein and Billy McNeill have been raised outside the Main Stand since 2005. The club began a feasibility study on safe standing in September 2011, received safety approval for rail seating in June 2015, and installed 2,975 rail seats in the Lisbon Lions Stand during the 2016 close season. The ground, which remains owned by Celtic F.C., held the opening ceremony of the 2014 Commonwealth Games, opened by Queen Elizabeth II, and with Hampden also given over to the Games that year Celtic played two European ties at Murrayfield; it has stood in for Hampden repeatedly, hosting the Scottish Cup finals of 1993 and 1998, the League Cup finals of 1993, 1996 and 1998, both national cup finals in 2013–14, and over twenty Scotland internationals, more than any ground other than the national stadium. The 2018–19 Pro14 final between Leinster and Glasgow was the first rugby union match played there. Plans for a hotel and museum on land between the Main Stand and London Road were approved in outline in September 2017 and amended in July 2020; the chief executive Peter Lawwell had said in April 2007 that another 8,000 seats could be added but that the work was not cost-effective, a position restated in November 2022 when the chief executive Michael Nicholson put the cost of redeveloping the Main Stand at up to £100 million.