Selhurst Park: 102 Years of Crystal Palace in South London

Crystal Palace played at Crystal Palace Park (the FA Cup Final venue 1895-1914) until 1915, then moved to the Nest in Croydon during the First World War years, before settling at Selhurst Park in 1924. The site was a former brickfield, purchased by the club for £2,750 and developed across two years. Archibald Leitch designed the original ground with a single grandstand on the east side and earth-bank terracing on the other three sides, with capacity initially set at 30,000.

The choice of Leitch was deliberate. By 1924 Leitch had completed stands at Ibrox, Goodison Park, Anfield, Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge, and was the dominant football architect in Britain. His Selhurst Main Stand carried the same pitched-roof, two-tier brick design as his earlier work, though at a smaller scale matching the lower-division club Palace then was. The brick lower-tier facade visible today is the original 1924 structure, now Grade II locally listed by Croydon Council.

Selhurst Park is the only English football ground to have hosted three top-flight clubs as primary tenants. Crystal Palace have been the permanent tenant since 1924. Charlton Athletic shared the ground 1985-91 after their Valley ground was closed for safety reasons. Wimbledon FC shared the ground 1991-2003 after losing their Plough Lane home, with Wimbledon's "Crazy Gang" era and 1988 FA Cup win staged from Selhurst for their final dozen years.

The shared-tenancy era produced one of English football's most unusual fixture quirks: in March 1992 Crystal Palace played Wimbledon at Selhurst, with the AWAY team's dressing room being closer to the pitch than the home team's. Wimbledon left for Milton Keynes in 2003, and Selhurst Park returned to Crystal Palace as sole tenant. The shared decades left two practical legacies: the ground retains separate "home" and "visitor" badges in places where Palace and Wimbledon had simultaneous claims, and the Whitehorse Lane End was unofficially called "the Wimbledon end" through the 1990s.

The Taylor Report (1990) following Hillsborough required all top-flight grounds to convert to all-seater. Crystal Palace's response was a phased rebuild: the Arthur Wait Stand was upgraded to seating in 1989-91, the Whitehorse Lane Stand was completed as an all-seater in 1983 (ahead of the Taylor requirement), and the major project — the Holmesdale Road Stand — was completed in 1994. The Holmesdale Road Stand's distinctive curved roof, designed by Atherden Fuller architects, gives Selhurst Park its current asymmetric silhouette: a low Main Stand on one side, a tall curved-roof stand at the south end, and uniform mid-height stands at the other two ends.

The current capacity of 25,486 is the lowest of any Premier League ground as of the 2025-26 season. A planned expansion of the Main Stand to a new two-tier 13,500-seat structure was approved by Croydon Council in 2018 and would take total capacity to 34,000+, but the project was paused during the pandemic and has not restarted as of 2026. The Leitch-era 1924 brickwork would be incorporated into the new facade per the heritage-protection conditions Croydon attached to planning approval.

Selhurst Park has hosted Premier League football continuously since Crystal Palace's 2013-14 promotion. The Holmesdale Fanatics, the singing section in the Holmesdale Road Stand, are one of the few English club ultras groups with a formal organisational structure, and have produced banner displays and tifos at the standard of Bundesliga or Serie A supporters' groups. Selhurst's acoustic character — the curved Holmesdale roof and the close pitch-to-stand distance — concentrates crowd noise more aggressively than its 25,486 capacity would suggest, with several visiting managers (Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp, Mauricio Pochettino) describing it in post-match interviews as among the loudest grounds they visit.

The South London location also gives Selhurst Park a particular cultural anchor. It is the only Premier League ground south of the Thames, drawing supporters from Croydon, Bromley, Sutton and inner South London in a way no other top-flight club covers. Brick-by-brick scale models capture the asymmetric four-stand silhouette and have become a popular fan gift for Palace supporters in the diaspora.