The St Lawrence Ground is a cricket ground in Canterbury, Kent. It is the home ground of Kent County Cricket Club and since 2013 has been known as The Spitfire Ground, St Lawrence, due to commercial sponsorship. It is one of the oldest grounds on which first-class cricket is played, having been in use since 1847, and is the venue for Canterbury Cricket Week, the oldest cricket festival in the world. It is one of the two grounds used regularly for first-class cricket that have had a tree, the St Lawrence Lime, within the boundary. Capacity at the ground was increased to 15,000 in 2000, and four One Day International matches have been played there, one each in 1999 (part of the 1999 Cricket World Cup), 2000, 2003 and 2005. The ground was the venue for the first day/night County Championship match, played as a trial in September 2011. History The ground was first established in 1847 on farmland owned by the fourth Baron Sondes. The land was the site of the St Lawrence Hospital, a leper hospital founded in the mid-12th century, and immediately to the south of the Old Dover Road, which follows the line of the Roman road that ran from Dover to Canterbury. A Tudor manor house had been built on the site after the dissolution of the hospital in the mid 16th century and this had been demolished by 1839. In the 18th century the house was known as St Lawrence. The ground was laid out by Fuller Pilch, a professional cricketer who had been the groundsman at Town Malling and, from 1842, the Beverley Ground in north-east Canterbury. Kent County Cricket Club had been formed at the Beverley Ground in 1842 and the St Lawrence Ground was established to be used for their Canterbury Cricket Week in 1847. The 1847 Cricket Week saw the first first-class cricket matches held on the ground, with Kent playing England and the Gentlemen of Kent playing the Gentlemen of England. Initially, the St Lawrence ground was used only for the annual Cricket Week, and pasture land for the rest of the each year. A St Lawrence Cricket Club was formed in 1864 specifically to use the ground more regularly for cricket and improvements began to be made to the ground in the 1870s after the amalgamation of the East (Beverley) and West (Maidstone) Kent Cricket Clubs, forming the