Ground swell of affection

Atomic Kitten are cooler than you think. It turns out that being banned from Lord's for noise pollution was quite a privilege. Among the rackets that the old girl has hosted over the years are military parades, a week's encampment of Iowan Indians, baseball matches and a hot air balloon launch.

Sniffing out these details is Stephen Green, for more than 35 years curator of the Lord's museum, who marks his retirement with this book. His love for the ground and the institution shines out, although it may have contributed to the odd blind spot, too. In his introduction he tells with pleasure of his interview for the job in which "I was lucky in that one of my interrogators had been educated at my old college". Times, one hopes, have changed.

Green's book - a history of Lord's at all three of its homes - is full of gorgeous glossy plates: paintings of military parades held at Lord's during the Napoleonic Wars in which the verdant pastures of north-west London can be seen stretching into the distance, a sketch of a sprinting WG Grace by George Elgar Hicks right in which, his wizard's beard flying in the wind, he strikes far more the romantic artist than the usual smug bully.

In fact, the illustrations alone provide a social commentary - a painting of WG leaning on the pavilion gate as the professionals go through a different one, a poignant snap of a 1914 dinner marking the centenary of the present ground just before the outbreak of war. The world would never be the same - though perhaps at Lord's it remained so longer than anywhere else.

Twenty-three years after that photograph was taken a book was published to celebrate the club's 150th birthday and under the introduction - An Imperial Institution - are the immortal words, "The MCC will not be hustled in spite of the modern demand for speed and excitement".

They need not have worried. Women members were admitted only in 1998, a fact that merits only four sentences in the book while women's cricket fails even to get a mention.

Green's strength lies in his burrowing for obscure details: how sheep used to keep the Lord's grass down on the way to Smithfield Market; the time Peter, the Lord's cat, got his obituary in Wisden; what happened to Father Time in the face of World War II barrage balloons. He prints a scorecard from the RAF v The Rest game on June 2, 1941, which offers sensible air-raid advice: "Good cover from shrapnel and splinters should be obtainable under the concrete stands. Spectators are advised not to loiter in the streets."

And he digs out a spot of advice for cricket bosses everywhere. In 1898 Henry Perkins, the retiring secretary, told his successor: "On no account whatsoever should you take any notice of the Committee."