St Andrew's, known since 2024 for sponsorship reasons as St. Andrew's @ Knighthead Park, is an association football stadium in the Bordesley district of Birmingham, England. It has been the home ground of Birmingham City Football Club for more than a century. From 2018 to 2021, its sponsored name was St Andrew's Trillion Trophy Stadium.
Constructed and opened in 1906 to replace the Muntz Street ground, which had become too small to meet the club's needs, the original St Andrew's could hold an estimated 75,000 spectators, housed in one grandstand and a large uncovered terrace. Between 1906 and 1939 it was reported that a lot of construction work took place inside the ground and the official capacity was set at 68,000 at the start of the 1938-39 season. The attendance record, variously recorded as 66,844 or 67,341, was set at a 1939 FA Cup tie against Everton. During the Second World War, St Andrew's suffered bomb damage and the grandstand, housing a temporary fire station, burned down in an accidental fire. In the 1950s, the club replaced the stand and installed floodlights, and later erected a second small stand and roofed over the open terraces, but there were few further changes.
The ground became dilapidated: a boy was killed when a wall collapsed during rioting in the 1980s. When new owners took the club out of administration in 1993, they began a six-year redevelopment programme during which the ground was converted to an all-seater stadium to comply with the Taylor Report into safety at sports grounds, and all areas apart from the Main Stand were completely rebuilt. The seating capacity of the modern stadium is 29,409. It has function rooms suitable for business or social events and a club store selling Birmingham City merchandise. A 2004 proposal that the club should sell the ground and move into a multi-purpose City of Birmingham Stadium came to nothing. In 2013, the ground was listed as an asset of community value under the Localism Act 2011.
St Andrew's has been the venue for England international football matches at all levels below the senior national team, and for semifinal matches in the FA Cup and finals of lesser competitions. It was also used as Coventry City's home ground for the 2019–20 and 2020–21 seasons. It has played host to events in other sports, including rugby union and professional boxing, and more recently has staged music concerts. It is the third largest sporting venue in the West Midlands - ahead of The Hawthorns, Alexander Stadium and Poundland Bescot Stadium but behind Villa Park and Molineux Stadium.
History
Former grounds
Small Heath Alliance—the original name of Birmingham City Football Club—played their first home games on waste ground off Arthur Street, in the Bordesley Green district of Birmingham, very near the site where St Andrew's would be built. In 1876, they made a temporary move to a fenced-off field in Ladypool Road, Sparkbrook, with an estimated capacity of 3,000 spectators; because the field was enclosed, admission could be charged. Interest in the team grew, and a year later they moved again, this time to a rented field in Small Heath, situated on the eastern edge of Birmingham's built-up area, just north of the main road to Coventry. This ground, which became known as Muntz Street, had four sides of open terracing, a small covered wooden stand, and a changing-room for the players. When first opened it could hold approximately 10,000 spectators. Over the years the height of the terracing was raised, which increased the capacity to around 30,000, but this became insufficient to cope with the demand. The attendance at a match in 1905 against local rivals Aston Villa was officially recorded as 28,000 spectators, but several thousand more climbed walls or forced turnstiles to gain entry. The landlords refused to sell the freehold of the ground, nor would they permit major extensions to be made. As the board of directors estimated that staying at Muntz Street was costing the club £2,000 a year (£ at today's prices), they began the search for an alternative site.
Construction
Director Harry Morris identified a site for a new ground in Bordesley, some three-quarters of a mile (1 km) from Muntz Street towards the city centre. Covering an area of , bounded by Cattell Road, Coventry Road, Tilton Road, Garrison Lane and the railway, and near St Andrew's church, the site was where a brickworks had once operated. Though Morris described the land itself as "a wilderness of stagnant water and muddy slopes", the Sporting Mail considered it "very favourably situated for obtaining easy communication with the city and many of the suburbs, and will be served by an excellent service of electric cars [trams], while the provision of a railway station close at hand is also considered as within the bounds of possibility."
The club took the land on a 21-year lease, and entrusted the role of surveyor and engineer to a local carpenter, Harry Pumfrey, who despite a lack of qualifications produced plans "which would have done credit to the most expensive professional architect". Club director Thomas Turley, a builder, acted as clerk of works, and it is estimated the club saved more than £2,000 in professional fees by keeping the work in-house. Tradition has it that gypsies, evicted from the site before work could begin, laid a 100-year curse on the club; although gypsies are known to have camped nearby, there is no contemporary evidence for their eviction by the club, and construction began in February 1906.
Artesian springs, which kept the land flooded, had to be drained and blocked off with tons of rubble before soil could be laid on top. To create height for the terracing on the Coventry Road side of the ground, the club offered the site as a tip: local people paid a total of £800 (£ today)for dumping an estimated 100,000 loads of rubbish. This embankment was known from the beginning as the Spion Kop, stood 110 terraces high at its highest point, and had a reported capacity of 48,000 spectators, each paying 6d (£ today). The Grandstand, on the Garrison Lane side of the ground, was in length. It held 6,000 seats divided among six sections, priced from 1s to 2s (£ to £ today), and all accesses were lit by electricity. In front of the stand was space for 5,000 to stand under cover. Beneath the stand were refreshment rooms, changing rooms, a training area with plunge bath, a billiard room donated by brewery magnate Sir John Holder, and the club's boardroom and offices, which hitherto had been maintained in premises in Birmingham city centre. Behind the goal at the railway end of the ground was space for a further 4,000 standing spectators, and access to the ground was gained via turnstiles on three sides of the ground. Total capacity was estimated at 75,000, and construction cost at £10,000 (£ today). The playing surface, at , was one of the largest in the country, had a four-yard (3.7 m) grassed border, and was surrounded by a cinder running track.
Early years St Andrew's was officially opened by Sir John Holder on 26 December 1906, when Birmingham played Middlesbrough in a First Division fixture. There had been heavy snowfall overnight, and dozens of volunteers, including members of the club's board, worked all morning to clear the pitch. The game finally kicked off an hour late, finishing goalless in front of 32,000 spectators. The Birmingham Daily Post editorial next day suggested that "the fact that so many spectators attended under such adverse conditions augurs well for the step that the directors have taken", and that the directors were "to be congratulated in having provided their supporters with a ground second to none in the country".
The Football Association chose St Andrew's to host the 1907 FA Cup semifinal between The Wednesday and Woolwich Arsenal; Wednesday won 3–1, and went on to win the tournament. This was the first FA Cup tie to be played at the ground, as Birmingham had lost their opening match away from home. Three more semifinals took place at St Andrew's before the Second World War, in 1911, 1924 and 1934. The club bought the freehold of the ground in 1921 for a price believed to be less than £7,000 (£ today). In the 1930s, roofs were erected over the Kop and Railway End terraces, and in February 1939, the ground attendance record of 66,844 or 67,341, was set at the fifth-round FA Cup tie against Everton.
Wartime During the First World War, the club supported the war effort by allowing the ground to be used as a rifle range for military training. On the outbreak of the Second World War, all outdoor sport was banned by the Government until safety implications could be assessed. When football resumed a few weeks later, Birmingham's Chief Constable ordered the ground's closure because of its proximity to air-raid targets such as the BSA munitions factories. The matter was first raised in Parliament in November 1939, but the Home Secretary felt unable to intervene. By March 1940, when St Andrew's had for some time been the only football ground in England still closed, the Chief Constable bowed to public pressure, and a crowd of 13,241 witnessed Birmingham's first home game in more than six months.
In 1941, St Andrew's suffered 20 direct hits from Luftwaffe bombing, which destroyed the roof of the Kop, badly damaged the Railway End, and forced the team to play elsewhere. It was therefore a surprising choice of venue for a wartime international match between England and Wales; on safety grounds, spectators were required to purchase tickets in advance, and numbers were limited to 25,000. Three months later, the Main Stand, which was being used as a temporary National Fire Service station, burned down, destroying the club's records and equipment"not so much as a lead pencil was saved from the wreckage"Contemporary report, cited in .when a fireman mistook a bucket of petrol for water when intending to damp down a brazier. The team returned to the ground in 1943.
Improvements The replacement Main Stand, built in the early 1950s, used a propped cantilever roof design, which meant fewer pillars to block spectators' view of the pitch. Floodlights were installed, and officially switched on for a friendly match against Borussia Dortmund in October 1956. By the early 1960s, a stand had been built at the Railway End to the same design as the Main Stand, a new roof erected over the Kop, and the Tilton Road end covered for the first time. A scoreboard and clock were installed at the City end of the ground in memory of Birmingham and England player Jeff Hall, who died of polio during the 1958–59 season. In the 1970s, the Asda chain proposed to share the cost of a new stand as part of a supermarket development on land behind the Kop made vacant by slum clearance; in the face of opposition from commercial rivals, the proposal fell through.
Modernisation The last home game of the 1984–85 promotion season, against Leeds United, was marred by rioting, culminating in the death of a 15-year-old boy, Ian Hambridge, when a wall collapsed on him; a memorial plaque was eventually placed near the spot. The riot was on the same day as the Bradford City stadium fire, and the events at St Andrew's were included in the remit of the Popplewell inquiry into safety at sports grounds. In response to this and the later Taylor Report, the capacity of St Andrew's was cut to 26,000, but it was accepted that the stadium had to be brought up to modern standards. Club chairman David Gold recalled his first visit in March 1993: