Birthplace of Modern Football

Take a look at this building... the Grand Connaught Rooms. Fancy function hall, right? Weddings, corporate events, black-tie dinners. But if you're a football fan, you are standing on Sacred ground. Because right here... on a Monday evening in eighteen sixty-three... the beautiful game was born.

London · from the walk “The Beautiful Game: London's Football Trail”

Open the walk

Grand Connaught Rooms, 61-65 Great Queen Street, London WC2B 5DA

The Freemasons' Tavern stood at this very address, sixty-one to sixty-five Great Queen Street, from seventeen seventy-five until it was demolished in nineteen oh nine to make way for the building you see today. And it was inside that smoky Victorian tavern that a Yorkshire solicitor named Ebenezer Cobb Morley changed the world.

For centuries, there were no universally accepted rules for playing football. In eighteen sixty-two, Morley, as captain of Barnes Football Club, wrote to Bell's Life newspaper proposing a governing body for the sport. His simple idea? Football needed proper rules... just like cricket had.

So on the twenty-sixth of October, eighteen sixty-three, captains, secretaries, and representatives of a dozen London clubs met right here at the Freemasons' Tavern. Their purpose was to form an association with the object of establishing a code of rules for the regulation of football.

But here's what most people don't know. It wasn't one meeting. The first version of the rules was drawn up over a series of Six meetings held in this tavern from October till December. And those meetings got Heated. At the final meeting, F. M. Campbell, the first FA treasurer and the representative from Blackheath, withdrew his club from the FA over the removal of two draft rules... the first allowing running with the ball in hand, and the second allowing hacking, which meant kicking an opponent in the shins.

That walkout was the Exact moment football and rugby split into two separate sports forever! Other English rugby clubs followed Blackheath's lead and in eighteen seventy-one formed the Rugby Football Union.

After those six meetings, the FA came up with thirteen rules, approved and written down in the FA Minute Book on the eighth of December. And the members couldn't even wait to try them out. The first game under FA rules was played at Mortlake on the nineteenth of December eighteen sixty-three between Morley's Barnes team and their neighbours Richmond... ending in a goalless draw. A nil-nil! Some things about football never change.

Now here's a detail that should give you chills. Of all the original founding clubs, Civil Service FC is the Only one still in existence with an unbroken history, still playing association football today... in the Southern Amateur League. And because the FA was the very first football association in the world, it doesn't use the word "English" in its title. It's simply... The Football Association. The original. The one that started everything.

Three Billion people watch this sport today. And it all began... right here... behind this wall.

Nearby stories

Newcastle House — The Bank of England's Birthplace — 140 m
Lindsey House — Inigo Jones's Oldest Survivor — 150 m
57–58 Lincoln's Inn Fields — Where Dickens First Read Aloud — 150 m
The Princess Louise — 200 m
The Old Curiosity Shop — London's Greatest Literary Fake — 240 m
Margaret MacDonald Memorial — 250 m