Sport

Professional football was legalized in Britain in 1885. However, crowd safety remained an important issue during the first half of the 20th century. Here John Walton charts some of the tragedies at football matches.

Queen Anne ordered a racecourse to be built on Ascot Heath in 1711. It was officially opened on August 11th.

Richard Cavendish traces the evolution of today's 'mega-bucks' sports industry back to a small competition in Scotland in the mid-19th Century.

The modern Olympic movement was inspired by the classical world. But, says Richard Bosworth, when the Italian capital hosted the Games 50 years ago, the organisers had to offer an image of the city that also took account of its Christian, Renaissance and Fascist pasts.

Mike Marqusee revisits S.M. Toyne’s article, The Early History of Cricket, on the origins and growth of the game, first published in History Today in June 1955.

Football became a potent expression of Algeria’s struggle for independence, never more so than during the dramatic events that preceded the 1958 World Cup, as Martin Evans explains.

Objects loaded with the history of the Troubles are scattered around Belfast, but sensitivity means the debate about how and where to exhibit them rumbles on, says James Morrison.

Byron’s love affair with bare-knuckle boxing was shared by many of his fellow Romantics, who celebrated this most brutal of sports in verse. John Strachan examines an unlikely match.

The 1908 Summer Olympics opened in London on April 27th. It was the first occasion on which the Olympic movement visited Britain. Stephen Halliday describes how the British Olympic Association prepared for the Games with barely two years notice.

In March 1966, a few months before the England football team won the World Cup, the Football Association lost the trophy. Martin Atherton tells the full, often farcical, story of the theft and recovery of the Jules Rimet Trophy.

Mike Huggins revisits the early years of British greyhound racing, the smart modern sports craze of interwar Britain.