It's hard to imagine a time when the Melbourne Cricket Ground wasn't such a conspicuous feature of the Melbourne skyline.

Known as "the people's ground", the MCG is celebrating its 170th birthday this weekend — fittingly, the day after hosting a bumper AFL preliminary final between Collingwood and the Giants.

Really, it's a cricket ground in name only, having hosted everything from music concerts to religious gatherings, an Olympic Games, a Commonwealth Games and more than 3,000 games of football.

The chances are, if you live in Melbourne, you'll visit the ground at some point, for some reason even if the thwack of leather on willow is not your cup of tea.

It's a magnet.

Few people know the ground and its history as well as Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC) librarian David Studham, who has spent much of the past 30 years working in the MCC library in the heart of the stadium.

"It's a big landmark that you can see from different parts of the city, those light towers especially stand out to show what is like the beating heart of Melbourne," he said.

Ironically, the current stadium was not the first "Melbourne Cricket Ground", nor was it the MCC's first choice as a home.

Humble beginnings in a horse paddock

Prior to 1853, the fledgling Melbourne Cricket Club played its matches at what was known as Emerald Hill, in the area roughly where Crown Casino now stands.

That first "Melbourne Cricket Ground" was prone to flooding and was slowly being enveloped by a tent city that sprung up as the gold rush took off.

The final straw for the MCC was when the government decided to build a railway line adjacent to the ground, prompting the club to search — quite literally — for new pastures.

The Governor, Charles Latrobe, offered the club the use of a paddock in what at that stage was effectively the semi-rural village of Richmond.

Prior to white settlement, the area had been a meeting place for the Wurundjeri people, and in 1853 was being used to keep horses used by the police.

According to an article in The Courier in 1853, the Governor had "ever been foremost in patronising this manly game, is understood to be favourable to the claim, and disposed to give to the club a free grant of ten acres."

It took a year for the paddock to be made fit for cricket, with the first match being played there in September 1854.

Visiting English teams sparked improvements

There wasn't much in the way of stands in those early days, but the arrival of the England cricket team in 1861 sparked the first major upgrade of the ground.

"There was a temporary stand that was put up that went about a third of the way around the ground," David Studham said.

"So you just had the small members' pavilion and then this massive temporary stand."

Local entrepreneurs Spiers and Pond brought the England team to Australia in what was the first commercial sponsorship of cricket.

They made their money back on the first day of the tour when 25,000 people — roughly a quarter of the Melbourne population at that time — turned up at the MCG to watch.

Improving the ground to impress visiting English teams would be a running theme over the first 50 years of the MCG's life and the wealth that flooded into Melbourne courtesy of the gold rush meant even the loftiest dreams of the MCC were attainable.

A reversible stand was built in 1876, which allowed seats to be rotated to face the adjacent football ground and meant the MCC could charge spectators to watch a game that was being played on public ground.

If the stands were first rate for their time, the ground itself was a different story.

Photos from the 1870s show the outer edges of the playing surface looking more like a potato field than a world class venue.

That's not to say the MCC didn't try everything they could to get grass to grow.

"One year they were using it to dump night soil so they could help fertilise and another year they had a dog plague and they had dead dogs that were buried to help fertilise," David Studham said.

The MCG's reversible grandstand burnt down in the 1880s and its replacement stood until 1954 when it was demolished as part of improvements ahead of the 1956 Olympic Games.

The pavilion made quite an impression on the visiting England team in 1882 during what was the first Ashes series played in Australia.

"They looked at this magnificent new building and went back to England and said to their friends at Lords, hey Melbourne's got this massive new pavilion and they had a tiny pavilion which they soon replaced and built the current pavilion we know at Lords," Mr Studham said.

Getting the ground ready for the Olympics

It wasn't until the 1930s that the MCG became a full "doughnut" stadium, with seating in a complete circle around the ground.

The capacity in the 1930s was around 90,000, but that grew to more than 110,00 thanks to another renovation ahead of the 1956 Olympics.

There was not much interest in conserving what we now think of as heritage aspects of the stadium, with the Olympics considered more of a chance to show visiting royalty how modern Melbourne had become.

The oldest remaining feature of the stadium is a section of wrought iron fence dating to the 1880s that still exists in front of what is now the Shane Warne Stand.

The fence was originally adorned with ornate spikes which were removed before the 1956 Olympics given how close they stood to the end of the running track.

Other than that, the oldest remaining structures at the ground are the six enormous light towers erected in 1984.

Links to the past remain

Inside the members' atrium hangs the same clock that hung on the exterior of the original pavilion in the 1860s and its 1881 replacement.

The face of the clock was repainted in the 1920s and it sat in storage for years before taking pride of place in the rebuilt stadium in 2006.

It's a link to the past, like the MCG itself — standing the test of time in a way nobody could have predicted in 1853.

In 2023, the MCG has just experienced its biggest attendance during a home and away AFL season in its history.

What would the original MCC members think if they could see the ground today in all its glory, with tens of thousands of people streaming through the turnstiles?

"They'd be blown away," David Studham said.