Club’s failure to buy three tunnels beneath the Nursery end in 1999 have caused a problem which will not go away

With the great weekend of the summer at cricket’s HQ – the Test against South Africa – imminent, several hundred members of the Marylebone Cricket Club gathered in the pavilion the other night. They were not, however, discussing the match but an issue which, unknown to most cricket followers, is causing far more worry at Lord’s than the state of England’s batting order.

They met not in the Lord’s pavilion, the grand and famous Victorian one, but in something called the Nursery Pavilion, which is a prefab – hardly more than a glorified marquee – hard up against the forbidding brown-grey brick “prison wall” that separates the sacred home of cricket from the busy Wellington Road.

It has to be a prefab. MCC cannot dig down here, not even to plant a rose bush. They have not merely lost their old role as masters of the cricketing universe, they do not control all the earth beneath their feet. And that was the point of the meeting: a chance to resolve a problem that dates back to the 19th century.

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The current dispute began just before the last millennium and, given that it involves a 999-year lease, it may not be resolved until the next one. For the last 18 years has produced one of the most bizarre and bitter disputes in sport, so vicious that Sir John Major – used only to the genteel ways of Westminster – stalked off the committee in disgust.

And though the details are only patchily understood, even by the club’s own members, the continued existence of Lord’s as a major cricket venue could be at stake.

The threat is not yet as urgent as it was at the very start: 1890, when what became the Great Central Railway attempted to get a compulsory purchase order on Lord’s to run its trains in and out of Marylebone station. It was huge news at the time: a Punch cartoon showed WG Grace on horseback, leading out an army of bat-wielding cricketers to confront an approaching steam engine.

Eventually a deal was done and the railway acquired a 124ft-wide strip of land under the eastern edge of Lord’s to run its trains in three tunnels. MCC outlasted the Great Central, which fell to the Beeching axe in 1966, although one of the tunnels is still in use running what are now Chiltern trains.

In 1999 Railtrack, the short-lived company that owned all Britain’s track after privatisation, decided to sell off the redundant tunnels, and offered Lord’s a 999-year lease. The club faffed around. So there was an auction instead: MCC bid, but half-heartedly and, at £2.35m, the lease – and the right to develop the tunnels – was sold to a property company, the Rifkind Levy Partnership.

Oliver Stocken, a well-known City figure and later MCC’s chairman, told me the club could not then afford the tunnels. This is hard to believe. And no one was more staggered by the club’s reluctance than the man who was then chief executive of Railtrack, Gerald Corbett. Of whom more later.

Is the club there primarily for cricket or for its members? No one really knows

The Great Central was an ambitious company. And the tunnels below Lord’s are not to be confused with Tube lines or sewers: they form a breathtaking space, with innumerable possible uses. It is not clear that even now MCC has realised the potential, below ground as well as above. But it knew right away it was a disaster and it knew who was to blame: not itself for blowing a once‑in‑a‑millennium opportunity, but Charles Rifkind, the man who outbid it. How dare he?

Rifkind lives in St John’s Wood. He passed the prison wall daily, was appalled by the keep-out message it sent passersby and saw the potential. He is a property developer: of course he sniffed money. But it was more than that. The ground over the tunnels was dead space, and he sensed something could be made of it. He assumed MCC would get that too, to mutual benefit.

Instead, for seven years, the club sulked. Then in 2006 MCC appointed an outsider as chief executive, the Australian Keith Bradshaw. He met Rifkind; they got on. And from that arose an elaborate plan called The Vision, involving much new digging for a wholesale renewal of the ground. It was pushed forward by a development committee including Sir John Major and both Mike Atherton and David Gower. It also gave MCC a £100m windfall in return for about 140 flats in place of the dreaded wall.

However, this scheme came up against an ever bigger wall in the shape of Stocken, who had become club chairman in 2009. Stocken insisted the plan was impractical and risky, on which point he was probably right; in that sense he might have saved the club. But his methods of getting his own way caused enormous affront: he dissolved the development committee and imposed another, packed with placemen. Major walked out; Rifkind was again frozen out.

MCC has positioned itself in recent years as a moral exemplar to the game (“The Spirit of Cricket”), which makes it fortunate that outsiders know little of its opaque workings. It is not a democracy: almost half the committee and all the major office-holders are appointed not elected. Nor is it much of a club. There is little camaraderie or common purpose. Is the club there primarily for cricket or for its members? No one really knows.

The vast majority of those members come in via a waiting list that now stretches to 27 years: the average age is over 60. Most are anxious to make the most of their hard-won prestige and access. And provided the committee does nothing to prejudice that, they do as they are told. The annual meetings are sometimes contentious, but arguments are invariably settled by an obedient postal vote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest MCC members queue along the ‘prison wall that separates the sacred home of cricket from the busy Wellington Road’. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Towards the end of his term, Stocken shored up his power by re-introducing the long-lost system of “starring” preferred candidates for the elected half of the committee. It worked. But there are also a growing number of livelier members, who gravitate towards the unofficial Online Pavilion website.

This helped prevent any notion of Stocken securing his own succession. And in 2015 a new chairman emerged, from MCC’s secretive but in this case seemingly fair machinations. His name was Gerald Corbett, an obscure backbencher in MCC terms but the man who as boss of Railtrack had sold the tunnels in the first place.

He was, as usual, presented to the membership like a medieval monarch cradling his new man-child to the populace. But Corbett is a more genial figure than Stocken, with greater regard for the niceties. He set about trying to settle the Rifkind business once and for all.

Hence the meeting in the prefab, the last of five “roadshows” – two in London, three in the provinces, just like an Ashes series – presenting two competing development schemes to the members: either a revamped version of MCC’s own piecemeal “Masterplan”, which ignores the contentious strip except to move the Nursery Ground closer to the prison wall; or the latest iteration of Rifkind’s alternative, making use of the disputed territory to include two blocks containing 97 flats – now more discreetly placed on the corners – and offering £150m in direct payment and assorted sweeteners. No compromises: one or the other.

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The precise breakdown of the payment is almost certainly irrelevant because it ain’t going to happen. With the consultations ended, the committee is expected to make a recommendation in late July to be ratified by the members in September. The committee is believed to be almost unanimously against Rifkind.

And the first floor-speaker in the prefab set the tone for the evening: “Residential development at Lord’s, the Home of Cricket? Never! Never! Never!” A former committee man put it more suavely: “We’ve been in business for 200 years … I think we can continue and move slowly forward.”

The Rifkind camp thinks it may have got a draw at the meeting in Bristol, but accepts that it got walloped in the other four matches. Most ballots are unpredictable these days. Not at Lord’s, though.

The debate has undoubtedly been fairer than anything permitted by Stocken. But Rifkind and Morley were not allowed to present their case to the meetings, merely to answer questions. And the document, sent to all members, reviewing both options was clearly, if subtly, skewed, in favour of MCC’s plans; the interlopers were forced to hand out their own brochure outside the gates. On the field, MCC has always been reluctant to doctor its wickets in the home team’s favour. This is a harsher game.

Rifkind’s offer does have something the club cannot match: a thick layer of futureproofing. MCC’s plans depend heavily on Lord’s continuing to host two Test matches a year – which is uncertain even in the very short-term and certainly not beyond that – and on the planned new city-based Twenty20 tournament.

Lord’s also has to cope with council-imposed restrictions on both floodlights and non-cricketing earners like rock concerts. Soon it is likely to be relegated to London’s third-biggest cricket venue, behind the ambitious Oval and the Olympic Stadium. The risk is that it becomes an agreeably quaint relic, an urban Arundel; and, in due course, genuinely hard-up. It requires a particular kind of genius to own 17 acres in St John’s Wood and not have made an impregnable pile of money from the 50-year property boom.

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In the meantime the members will delight in the impending defeat of the evil forces of Mammon, although not for the first time MCC may be misreading Rifkind. If this was ever about money for him, that ceased long ago. He could and probably should have just shrugged and moved on to a less contentious site. But he is quite clearly obsessed. He is also very resourceful; with him there is always a Plan B, C or Z.

The Masterplan includes the prettification of the internal side of the prison wall by tree-planting. In pots, to avoid the 18-inch restriction. The other side of the wall is likely to be unchanged. MCC has never worried too much what face it presents to the outside world.