A Set of Maps about British Tennis
The Landmark Atlas guide to the Wimbledon fortnight
It’s the start of the annual fortnight when Britain pays attention to tennis as Wimbledon gets underway today.
The All England Club will be hoping for a return to normality after two Covid-disrupted years. The pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 edition of the tournament altogether for the first time since World War II. The 2021 edition was rescheduled and had various Covid-related measures in place such as reduced capacity and a requirement for a negative test or full vaccination.
As the nation prepares to have Sue Barker and Tim Henman on in the background, Landmark Atlas has taken a look at the state of tennis courts and clubs around the country.
How many tennis courts are there in Britain?
The Tennis Industry Association cited a 2018/19 Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) report as counting 24,046 courts at 5,273 venues and clubs in England and Wales. A 2017 report that I was able to find from the LTA had around 23,000 courts available in Britain.
Another approach is to use the Ordnance Survey. The cartographers designate greenspace up and down the country. Within this greenspace they have identified outdoor spaces that are tennis courts. Despite the name this can mean hard courts available in parks.
The total area of all of these courts up and down Britain is about 10.79 square kilometres.
That’s equivalent to one giant tennis court 4,835m long and 2,231m wide. It’s enough to fit 41,292 standard-sized courts inside it, assuming you lined them up with no space in between.
If we put this one enormous court in central London, it would look something like this:
How much of British land is tennis courts?
Very little.
The Ordnance Survey data shows that about 0.005% of Britain is made up of outdoor public tennis courts.
London has the highest proportion of land covered by outdoor tennis courts of any county in Britain. Excluding the City, 0.11% of the capital is a tennis court.
In general urban areas have more courts marked by the Ordnance Survey. Outside cities, the Home Counties have the highest share of tennis courts available.
As you can see from this map, the average central point of all of Britain’s outdoor tennis courts taken together is at quite a southerly latitude. It’s the green dot about level with Birmingham. Bear in mind this includes all of Scotland’s courts marked on the Ordnance Survey as well.
Tennis clubs
This map shows all the establishments with “tennis” in the title that are found in the Food Standards Agency (FSA) database.
If your tennis club has a bar or restaurant area, there is a good chance it’s listed below. My assumptions are that this includes a good proportion of Britain’s private clubs and that it’s the best publicly available, reusable list.
Britain’s tennis clubs are clustered in the country’s urban areas, especially around London and the Liverpool-Manchester conurbation.
A posh sport?
Tennis has a bit of a reputation for being a ‘posh sport’. Wimbledon has an association with royalty and is set in middle class London surburbia.
Fairly or unfairly, that is a perception of the sport. More to the point: tennis can be seen as an expensive sport in which to participate and therefore the preserve of the wealthy (although it doesn’t have to be).
The chart below shows the locations of the tennis clubs in the FSA data that are in England by the deprivation of the surrounding neighbourhood.
This Index of Multiple Deprivation assesses small neighbourhoods across England by different deprivation metrics and assigns them a score between 1 and 10, with 1 being the 10 per cent most deprived areas in the country.
More than 70 clubs were in England’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, compared to fewer than 10 in the country's most deprived areas.
As far as private clubs go, it does seem as though they are more commonly found in England’s wealthier neighbourhoods.
But these clubs aren’t the only place to play the sport. The LTA is trying to bring tennis to parts of the country where kids may not be able or think to pick up a racket through its SERVES programme.
The programme recognises that if you have a racket, a ball and some space you can play tennis more or less anywhere. A cool glass of orange juice served afterwards is a bonus.