Golf club at centre of Wimbledon expansion row is an overgrown eyesore

Telegraph

2 days ago

The first thing you notice is the weeds. Wherever you turn, it seems little has escaped the clutches of nature's graffiti.
Then there are the 'EXCLUSION ZONE' signs and their dire warnings to keep out of the most overgrown regions for your own safety or that of the local wildlife. Smaller patches of land deemed hazards are encircled by wooden or ugly plastic-mesh fencing. Even the accessible areas are unkempt, sun-scorched or dust-ridden.
You have to remind yourself that you are standing on what once was Wimbledon Park Golf Club, a place of pristine fairways, sculpted bunkers and manicured greens that had stood proudly for more than a century opposite the grass tennis courts of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (AELTC).
If this is what has become of that 73-acre strip of land in the two-and-a-half years since the golf club closed, what ravages will be wreaked upon it while a bitter legal battle over its future rages on?
This decaying landscape is usually closed to the public, kept under lock and key behind fences and signs that warn 'Patrol Dogs on site'. But it is opened up during Wimbledon fortnight, primarily as home to the Championships' famous queue and as a car and cycle park.
This year, that has coincided with a two-day judicial review into plans to transform the defunct golf course into 39 tennis courts – including a new 8,000-seat show court – as part of a £200 million expansion of the AELTC. Those plans, which would allow the Wimbledon qualifying tournament to be brought in-house and extend the existing event staged at the grounds by a week, have pitted the AELTC against hundreds of local residents behind a campaign called Save Wimbledon Park (SWP).
The warring factions have been on a collision course ever since the AELTC acquired the leasehold of the golf club for £65 million in 2018 and arguably even since it bought the freehold from Merton Council a quarter of a century earlier – when it also agreed to a covenant restricting future development on the site.
'You could not have a more protected piece of land in London,' SWP's KC, Sacha White, told the High Court hearing into last year's approval of the AELTC expansion plans by the Greater London Authority. And yet, as Telegraph Sport found when patrolling it the following day, this piece of land is far from being 'protected' thanks to a dispute which has left its future shrouded in uncertainty.
That future will be a bleak one unless the AELTC is allowed to develop some sort of tennis facility on the golf club. For, what is the alternative? What use is that land to the AELTC otherwise? Why would it commit tens, or hundreds, of millions of pounds to develop it into anything else? And who would buy that land from the AELTC if they, too, were prevented from commercialising it?
Merton Council certainly could never afford to buy it back. And, even if it could, would taxpayers really want hundreds of millions of pounds of public money spent transforming the golf club? Especially when the AELTC is offering to fund such a project in its entirety, convert 27 acres of private land to public parkland in the process, and even clean up the park's lake in a move that has won the support of legendary sailor and local resident Sir Ben Ainslie.
Never mind scrolling through the various artists' impressions that have been released by the AELTC, you only need look at the current Wimbledon grounds to see what expansion could look like. There is surely not a more beautifully-maintained facility in all the land.
It is perfectly legitimate to question whether as many as 39 new tennis courts are needed to bring the Wimbledon qualifying tournament in-house, or the extent to which local residents have been consulted about those plans, or whether moves should have been made to sweeten the deal for them. After all, Wimbledon Park Golf Club members got £85,000 each when the AELTC bought a leasehold for the land that was due to expire in 2041. But the idea that it has a viable future that excludes enough tennis courts to incentivise the AELTC to invest in it is pure fantasy.
Typically, each side of the legal row has effectively blamed the other for the land being left in limbo, with senior figures at the AELTC privately questioning the motives of some of the opponents of expansion and pointing out no one had put forward an alternative plan to its own.
A spokesperson said: 'Our proposals will deliver one of the greatest sporting transformations for London since 2012.
'They are crucial to ensuring Wimbledon remains at the pinnacle of tennis, one of the world's best sporting events, and a global attraction for both London and the UK. On offer are substantial year-round benefits for our community and the delivery of significant social, economic and environmental improvements.
'This includes more than 27 acres of new public parkland on what is currently inaccessible, private land. Our plans will increase the size of Wimbledon Park by a third and create spaces for people and nature to thrive.
'There will be a very significant increase in biodiversity across the site and our proposals are underpinned by more than 1,000 hours of ecological surveys, which are endorsed by the London Wildlife Trust.
'We have spoken to more than 10,000 people as part of our consultation events, and we know that the vast majority of people just want us to get on and deliver the many benefits on offer.'
A spokesman for SWP, Simon Wright, told Telegraph Sport that one of the opponents of the AELTC's plan, Richard Rees, had been working on an alternative proposal for the site. But he said Rees, who was previously the lead planner for the building of Wimbledon's Court No 1 and the development of Henman Hill, was not ready to share details of that publicly.
He added: 'We at Save Wimbledon Park are not anti-tennis – we love tennis and love Wimbledon. We love Wimbledon the way it is and we do not want to see it triple its current size, moving from 'tennis in an English garden' to an industrial tennis complex.
'For the last four years, the AELTC have said that the development scheme they have put forward is the only possible scheme that is acceptable to them and that there is no Plan B.
'Repeatedly, we have called for AELTC to withdraw their plans and to come up with a revised plan having consulted meaningfully with local groups and key stakeholders. We are only taking action in the High Court because AELTC have refused to engage with us in any other way.
'Despite these two days in court, we remain convinced that conversation is better than litigation. Guided by highly experienced tennis master planner Richard Rees and working with other architectural and development experts in the SWP group, we believe that alternative schemes should be possible which would allow AELTC to achieve the overwhelming majority of their original goals with a reduced environmental impact and less loss of net biodiversity.
'However, SWP are not the property developers, and the onus must therefore be on AELTC to suggest an alternative way of using the former golf course land. We urge them to do so, and to base this on a truly independent consultation with the local community.
'The local community has lost significant trust in AELTC. Withdrawing these plans and beginning again would be a good way to begin to restore that trust.'