"St Andrews is situated in Small Heath, an inner-city area of Birmingham, England. It is about one and a half miles south east of Birmingham city centre. It is nestled between factories, a railway and residential properties.
Birmingham moved to St Andrews in 1906 from their previous ground at Muntz Street. The first game there was a goalless draw against Middlesbrough.
By far the most notorious piece of folklore involving St Andrews is that of the Gypsy curse. This was supposedly put on the ground because a group of travellers were forcibly moved off the piece of wasteland on which the stadium was built. In the 1980s manager Ron Saunders is believed to have had crosses placed on the floodlights and had the soles of his players boots painted red, to ward off the effect of the curse. Similarly Barry Fry claimed to have urinated in the corners of the pitch in the hope of improving the club's fortunes.
The record attendance at St Andrews was 66,844 for the 1939 FA Cup fifth round tie against Everton.
During the Second World War Birmingham was bombed extensively and St Andrews was temporarily closed. In 1941 the ground's Main Stand fell victim, not to Nazi bombers, but to a calamitous mistake by a local fire warden who doused a small fire with, what he thought was a bucket of water, but which turned out to be a bucket of petrol.
During the 1950s and 60s the Railway Stand (or City End) and the Main Stand were redeveloped. Between then and the early 1990s little was done to change the stadium, and as the fortunes of the club plummeted the ground looked increasingly shabby and old fashioned. Half of the ground consisted of a large terrace stretching from the old scoreboard and clock, around to the corner of the ground where the main stand meets the Tilton Road End. The other half of the ground consisted of the Main Stand and Railway end, two tier stands with facilities, in the form of executive boxes and restaurants or toilets, dividing the upper and lower tiers.
On May 11th 1985, the day of the tragic Bradford City disaster, a spectator at St Andrews was killed when a wall collapsed during rioting between Leeds United and Birmingham supporters.
In March 1993 David Sullivan, David Gold and Ralph Gold took over the club, marking the beginning of a turnaround in fortunes for the club. On the field the team began to progress slowly, and not without setbacks, towards the top flight of English football. St Andrews Stadium was also slowly modernised, beginning in 1994 with the £10 million redevelopment of the old Kop Stand and Tilton Road terrace. The rulings of the Taylor Report ensured that St Andrews was to be, from this point on, an all-seater stadium. The new stand took the form of a wrap-around single tier of seating, resembling other new football stadia of the period, like Middlesbrough’s Riverside Stadium or a small-scale version of the stands at Manchester United's Old Trafford.
Sullivan and the Gold brothers took another step in the development of St Andrews in 1998-99 when the Railway End was re-built. The 8,000 capacity stand included new changing facilities for the players, executive facilities and a high upper tier, dubbed the Olympic Gallery.
The club has tabled proposals for a new 50,000 seater stadium to replace St Andrews, to be named the City of Birmingham Stadium.
Source: Wikipedia
Useful Links:
Birmingham City Football Club website
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