Britain's lost cricket festivals - Chris Arnot

Visiting 30 lost festival grounds from Bournemouth to Abergavenny, Weston-super-Mare to Harrogate, Chris Arnot talks to former players, ground staff, club secretaries and spectators to re-live the days when the world's finest players, from Denis Compton to Barry Richards, came to town for one week only, packed the beer tent and thrilled the crowds. Armchair cricket at its best, this is an exploration of the declining phenomenon of the cricket festival - when one of the county cricket clubs takes a week or so of games out of its home ground to a club ground somewhere else in the county, often at the seaside, and attracts a large and festive crowd to a bucolic arena fringed with white marquees, beer tents and deckchairs. Nowadays many counties don't venture beyond their Test match-standard stadia all season, and other, once peripatetic counties like Essex, who used to play at Southend, Colchester, Chelmsford, Clacton, Westcliff and Leyton during a single season, now only leave the County Ground once a season at most. Following the huge success of Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds, Chris Arnot goes in search of the boundary ropes from around the country - from Essex at Southend to Wellingborough School - to relive the time when the greats of the international game including Glenn McGrath and Ian Botham lit up summer's afternoons at the summer cricket festivals.