Background and early history () (captioned "Recreation Ground", running adjacent to St. Michaels Road). . Located to the north of
Old Portsmouth, the area the ground occupies was previously a sea
inlet in the 17th century, across which a
dam was built; this dam allowed the sea into the inlet when the tide came in, and when the tide went back out the dam was closed and the water was only allowed to escape under a
watermill, named King's Mill, which powered the
production of grain in the mill. After this, the land was gradually reclaimed from the sea. This first match was won by Cambridge University Past and Present by 20 runs, following an Australian batting collapse in which
A. G. Steel took 5/24.
Hampshire first played there a week after the first match, against
Sussex in which they lost by an innings. Over the coming decade the ground was used once by
G.N. Wyatt's XI, on three occasions by
Oxford and Cambridge Universities Past and Present and twice by the
East of England.
Regular county venue Hampshire regained first-class status in 1895 and were admitted to the expanded
County Championship. Hampshire played their first first-class match at the ground in thirteen years in that season when they played
Leicestershire, Over the coming seasons, Hampshire tended to play two to three matches there per season. An 1897 fixture between Hampshire and Sussex saw
Arthur Webb score Hampshire's first first-class
century, while a match the following season which saw Surrey as the visitors drew a crowd of around 5,000. The arrangement of playing three matches a season at the ground continued until
World War I, while the first first-class match involving a services team took place in July 1911 when a combined Army and Navy team played a combined
Oxford and Cambridge Universities team.
World War II ended
county cricket until 1946, and during the war Portsmouth was heavily bombed by the German
Luftwaffe during
The Blitz.
Post-World War II First-class cricket returned to the ground after the war, when Hampshire played
Essex. The record attendance for a county match was achieved in 1948, when 10,000 watched Hampshire play Sussex. Hampshire continued to play four matches per season at United Services going into the 1950s. It was during this time under the leadership of
Desmond Eagar and
Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie that the Hampshire team was beginning to become a powerful force in the county game. Coupled with the batting of
Roy Marshall (who in five Portsmouth matches in 1957 scored 549, an unbeaten record for the ground),
Jimmy Gray and
Henry Horton, and backed up with the bowling of
Derek Shackleton,
Victor Cannings and
Malcolm Heath, Hampshire had a fairly successful period, finishing runners-up in 1958, before winning the County Championship for the first time in 1961, with Hampshire winning four of their five matches there in that season. They might have been successful in 1958, had it not been for two draws later in the season at the ground. Six first-class matches had been held there in 1962, before the schedule at the ground was reduced to five, with the expansion of List A cricket with the
Player's County League and
John Player League, on average two or three List A matches were held there over the coming seasons. Speculation about the ground's future use by Hampshire was mentioned as early as 1984, when a review of Portsmouth's history, published by Peter Thompson in
The News, speculated whether ground would survive to see a century of county cricket in 1995. To this day it is the joint lowest score Hampshire have dismissed a team for. In the County Championship match between the sides, Derbyshire looked on course to chase down their victory target of 235, when they were at 140/2. However, Malcolm Marshall took 7 wickets in 51 balls to hand Hampshire a 48 run victory. The local press described it as Marshall's "finest hour". Their final match there came days later in a List A fixture against
Middlesex in the
Norwich Union National League, With continued poor pitch reports and the centralisation of Hampshire's cricket at their new
Rose Bowl ground, these matches marked the final time Hampshire would play at the ground. Hampshire played 314 first-class matches there, winning 104 (33%), which compares favourably with Hampshire's other main grounds of the time, with a 27% win ratio at Dean Park, Bournemouth, and a 26% win ratio at the County Ground, Southampton. Hampshire also played 54 List A matches there. ==Records==