There was a little knot of demonstrators on Wimbledon Park Road on Friday morning, just up the way from the All England Lawn Tennis Club. It was a very proper little picket, polite placards, friendly flyers inviting people to sign a petition.
As protests go, it was ever so SW19, a civil sort of disobedience. “Welcome to Wimbledon Park!” the handouts read, “The Wimbledon and Southfields communities hope you have a great day at the tennis. They are giving up a lot so you can park here today.” Mainly their public park land, which the club has taken over so it can be used as a car park during the tournament.
In 2018, the AELTC bought a swath of Wimbledon Park, which was landscaped by Capability Brown in the 18th century. It recently announced plans to build 39 tennis courts there, one an 8,000-seat show court. Given that the AELTC now owns all this land, the local residents wonder, with good reason, why does the club insist on commandeering the part of the park set aside for public use and turning it into a car lot for three weeks at the height of summer.
“Since lockdown this park’s been a really important resource,” says Stuart Mathieson, who has lived in the area for 25 years. “People use it every day for exercise, and picnics, and the local school use it as their playing fields. It’s especially important for all the people in flats, who don’t have gardens, and for three weeks every summer it’s just taken over by this car park.”
Meanwhile, the land next door, owned by the AELTC, remains conspicuously empty. “That land there is owned by the club and there’s not a single car parked on it,” says Mathieson. “It’s their land, but it’s empty, and yet the public land is packed with cars. It’s crazy.”
“It’s a long-term problem,” says Sofia Browning. “If it was genuinely just about using the public land for two weeks, fine, but the club have such a history of encroaching, they expand and expand and expand, they’re like the great vampire squid of SW19. And of course they’re very good at PR. They use this whole ‘we’re a British institution’ argument against people who have issues with them. It’s almost as if you’re made to feel unpatriotic just because you’re standing up to the club. If this was an oil company everybody would be on board with us, and that’s exactly how they’re behaving, just like any other gigantic corporation that goes around squishing locals.”
The club’s latest development proposals for the park include what Browning describes a lot of “Capability Brown this” and “heritage that”, but, she says, precious little information on where, exactly, the club imagines all the cars are going to go. “They simply can’t rely on appropriating public space for a tournament that makes such a huge profit, that’s just wrong.” An AELTC spokesperson said that subject to planning approval it does intend to move the car parking on to its own land in future. It also pointed out that the money the club pays Merton council to use the park funds improvements to it.
It’s all coming to a head this fortnight. The club’s third and final planning consultation process for the development of the park closes on the last day of the championships. Browning says the timing isn’t a coincidence.
“It feels like a carefully crafted PR exercise,” says Mathieson. “There’s all this talk in the consultation documents about restoring Capability Brown’s vision for the park, but however much you spend on artists’ impressions of what it might look like, you can’t seriously pretend he imagined an 8,000-seat concrete show court.”
The AELTC spokesperson said proposals include the creation of a new park which will be freely accessible to the local community for 49 weeks of the year.
“We think it is a really exciting proposal which will enhance Wimbledon’s position on the world stage, but also create this amazing green space for the local community.”
A third protester, Chris Maynard, has been in the area since 1988. “We’ve rolled along with the changes over the years, but this has pushed it beyond a line,” Maynard says. “It’s a very dramatic change. They build well, they build carefully, but it is a very large development and it will change the character of the park for ever.” Maynard thinks the club wants to turn it into the SW19 version of the Nine Elms development in Battersea. “We just need to start pressing back.” Mathieson agrees with him: “I think the local community has had enough,” says Mathieson, “I love the tennis, I went to the tennis yesterday, but there’s just there’s no need for this.”
