Lord’s Cricket Ground in St John’s Wood, London, is one of the few real-world locations to play a central role in *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy* series — specifically in *Life, the Universe and Everything* (1982).
SEARCH 51.5297966, -0.1720384 Lord's Cricket Ground, St John's Wood Road, St. John's Wood, London, Greater London, England, NW8 8QN, United Kingdom
In the story, Lord’s becomes the unlikely focal point of a **cosmic conspiracy**. The entire cricket match is interrupted when a Krikkit warship materializes above the pitch, steals the **Ashes**, and vanishes back into hyperspace. The theft sets off a chain of events leading Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect to the planet Krikkit, home of a race that once destroyed nearly all life in the universe out of pure ignorance.
Adams, an enthusiastic but occasionally bewildered cricket fan, chose Lord’s — the so-called “home of cricket” — as the perfect stage for his satire of British parochialism, tradition, and misplaced importance. The calm civility of the cricket ground, disrupted by a galactic-scale intrusion, captures *Hitchhiker’s* at its best: the absurd colliding with the cosmic.
Fans sometimes visit Lord’s as a pilgrimage site, imagining the precise spot where the Ashes were spirited away by alien technology, never to be explained to the MCC.
