Lord's Pavilion

Lord's Pavilion is first of all a working cricket building. It stands at Lord's Cricket Ground in St John's Wood, London, and belongs to the Marylebone Cricket Club, the MCC, which still looks after the laws of the game. The Victorian pavilion, designed by the architect Thomas Verity, opened in 1890.

What brings art lovers here is the Long Room on the ground floor. Its walls are hung with oil paintings of famous matches and players going back to the 18th century, and every batter walking out to the middle has to cross it, past the members. Visitors usually see it on a guided tour of the ground, along with the dressing rooms and their honours boards, which record every Test century and five-wicket haul made at Lord's.

One of the best-known pictures there is Albert Chevallier Tayler's Kent vs Lancashire at Canterbury, painted to mark Kent's first County Championship title in 1906. Kent County Cricket Club owned it until the cost of insuring it grew too high and lent it to the MCC in 1999. At a Sotheby's sale in 2006 it fetched £680,000, a record for a cricket painting, and the buyer, the Andrew Brownsword Art Foundation, lent it back to hang in the Long Room.