QPR Through The Ages - A Brief History Of Queens Park Rangers
There is a ground in Shepherd's Bush, pressed so tightly against the surrounding terraced houses that on matchdays the roar from inside it reverberates off bedroom windows. It seats just over seventeen thousand people. It is called Loftus Road. And the club that plays there — Queens Park Rangers — has one of the most extraordinary, improbable, and quietly heroic histories in English football.
QPR Through the Ages is a ten-episode series covering the full arc of that history, from the club's peculiar founding in 1882 — the product not of one moment but of twelve separate clubs merging over two decades — to the present day. It is a history of patience and occasional brilliance, of near-misses that still hurt and triumphs that still glow, of a community in west London that decided, at some point in the nineteenth century, that this was their club and has never been persuaded otherwise.
Along the way we meet Rodney Marsh, who arrived in the summer of 1966 and made QPR nationally famous almost by himself. We spend a full episode on the 1975–76 season, when Dave Sexton's side played the most beautiful football in the club's history and came within one point of the First Division title. We cover Terry Venables, a plastic pitch, an FA Cup Final, and European football in Shepherd's Bush. We cover the Premier League years, Les Ferdinand, financial crisis, billionaire owners, and a Wembley play-off final that broke a generation of supporters.
Each episode runs to approximately thirty minutes, follows the same six-part structure — cold open, historical context, main narrative, player of the era, fan's eye view, and outro — and is designed to work equally well for QPR supporters who lived through these events and for anyone who has ever wondered what it means to follow a football club through thick and thin, across a hundred and forty years of west London Saturdays.
Come on you R's.
QPR Through The Ages - A Brief History Of Queens Park Rangers
Latest Episodes
Episode 7: The Premier League Dream "Four Seasons at the Top Table (1992–1996)
In August 1992, Queens Park Rangers kicked off their first match in the newly formed Premier League. Founder members. Right there at the beginning of the most watched football competition in the world, with seventeen thousand seats in a terrace...
Episode 6 : Venables, the Plastic Pitch and the FA Cup Final - Ambition, Artifice and Almost Again (1979–1989)
In the summer of 1981, Queens Park Rangers removed the grass from their football pitch and replaced it with a synthetic surface called Omniturf. They were the first Football League club to do it. The ball bounced differently. Visiting teams str...
Episode 5 : The Greatest Season - One Point. One Game. One Season That Never Ends. (1975–76)
Twenty-four wins. Sixty-seven goals. Fifty-nine points. Second place in the First Division by a single point, to Liverpool, after QPR had finished their season top of the table and waited ten days to find out if it was enough. It wasn't. But wh...
Episode 4 : Rodney Marsh and the Rocket Years - The Man Who Changed Everything (1966–1974)
In March 1967, a Third Division club came back from 2–0 down at half-time at Wembley to beat a First Division side and win the Football League Cup. That same season they won the Third Division championship. Two seasons after that they were in t...
Episode 3 : The Long Wait - Twenty Years of Nearly (1945–1967)
Twenty-two years in the third tier of English football without promotion. Third place in 1947–48. Fourth in 1951–52. Third again, years later. Always close enough to sting, never close enough to matter. This episode covers QPR's long postwar wa...