Our history

Cover of the club's centenary history, 1875 to 1975 — *South Hampstead Cricket Club 1875–1975*, the club's centenary history. Read the full book online

Beginnings

South Hampstead began as Crescent Cricket Club, formed in 1875 to play in Regent's Park. After about ten years in the park the club moved to the Eton and Middlesex ground at Primrose Hill and took the name South Hampstead. By 1889 its president was the Hon. Alfred Lyttelton, of the Middlesex and England cricketing family.

The club crest on a flag in the club colours — The club's colours have changed over the years: red, yellow and black until 1906, then dark and light blue, with claret and white added about twenty years later.

The ground

Houses covered the Primrose Hill ground in the early 1890s, and for a few years the club had no home of its own. From 1896 it rented a ground in St Quintin's Avenue, North Kensington, until the builders arrived there too. In 1900 it leased the ground it still plays on, seventeen years before the district was given the number NW6. Before 1914 Milverton Road was still fields, and the groundsman's horse, which wore leather overshoes to pull the mower and roller, was stabled behind the pavilion.

After sixty years as tenants of the Church Commissioners, the club bought the freehold in 1961. In 1968 the club built a new pavilion to replace the old wooden one.

A match at the ground in 1951 — The ground, 1951.

Cricket

The club kept playing through both World Wars. In the Second, members fought off plans to use the ground for allotments and prefabs, and at least one XI took the field throughout. Henry Malcolm, who first played for the club aged 15 in 1929, did much to keep it going.

Pen caricatures of four players from before 1914 — Players from before 1914, drawn for the club. Bottom right: "Pa" Sherwell, father of Percy.

Earlier, the Sherwell family had fielded a father and eight sons; Percy Sherwell went on to captain South Africa. In the 1970s the club won the Wills Trophy in 1971, 1973 and 1974 and the Middlesex League in 1974, going into its centenary year as the first club to hold league and cup together. It won the league again in 1988, and marked its 150th year in 2025. The club still brings players through. Nathan Fernandes, who played his junior cricket at South Hampstead, scored a century on his first-class debut for Middlesex in 2024.

Tennis

Tennis joined the cricket club on the ground. The first written reference to the tennis club is from 1929, and play probably started in the early 1920s, on grass. After the Second World War the grass gave way to five shale courts. Membership doubled when the Dollis Hill Tennis Club closed and its players came across, and the men's team won the North West Middlesex League four years running from 1963. Four courts were relaid with a red all-weather surface in 1966, and the fifth followed five years later. The tennis section built its own pavilion in 1985 and added changing rooms to it in 1993. Floodlights went up in 1990, reached courts 4 and 5 in 1996, and were replaced with LED lights in 2023.

The club today

Bowls, table tennis and, in winter, lacrosse also shared the ground over the years. In the late 1990s disease ruined the bowling green and the bowls section closed. A first plan for a health club with a pool on the old green fell through in 2000. A second was approved in February 2001, and the club leased the site to a leisure company for a gym, which opened as Cannons and is now Nuffield Health. The rent helped the club survive, and it remains a significant contribution to keeping sport going on the site.

Cricket and tennis are now the two sections of South Hampstead Club Ltd, which looks after the ground and both pavilions. New Articles of Association, adopted in June 2025, set out how the company and its sections work together, with directors nominated from each section. The club is run by volunteers, on the ground it first leased in 1900.

Want to read more? The club's centenary history (1975) is online at the Internet Archive .