Marion Regan, Strawberry grower
At Wimbledon they like to have strawberries that are not too large, not crunchy, juicy enough that you can balance your bowl on your knee and eat them with a plastic spoon. We use June-bearing varieties like Elsanta and Sonata, which are naturally cropping at this time of year. The royal box gets a different variety called Jubilee, a very premium berry with a sweet taste.
The later start this year hasn’t really made a difference to our operation. If anything it’s helped us, because it turns out this year there was a slightly later spring, whereas last year there was a very early start to the season. A week either way doesn’t change a great deal. It is the natural peak of the English strawberry season, which I think is why they are so closely related to Wimbledon. These days the strawberry season last about six months, but when the tournament started it was much shorter, and coincided with the tennis.
We pick and dispatch the strawberries on the same day. We start picking at 5am, and the final order will be confirmed while we’re picking. By this time the fruit is going into the cooler and the packhouse, where it’s weighed and prepared for its journey. We’re only 30 miles from London, so if play goes into the evening, by the end they’ll be serving that day’s crop.
I just think the industry as a whole is so lucky that the public associate the height of summer with eating strawberries. It’s great for the growers. We want to celebrate our fruit and we’re fortunate to have this great platform to do so.
Kevin Slatter Baker
My father first got the Wimbledon order years ago – it’s coming up to 50 years we’ve been supplying confectionery items to the tournament. These days we make the scones and a few selected pastries, and traditional fruit cake for the royal rooms. When he got the contract it was on a much smaller scale, but as the tournament has increased in size the order’s gone up and up. We can send off up to 10,000 scones a day – the other day we worked out that we’re about to bake our four millionth scone for Wimbledon.
We used to have a chain of shops, but our business has changed over the years and we now have just one retail shop in Sydenham, south-east London, and a web business called the Cake Store, mainly making celebration cakes. So we literally go from making 30 scones a day for the shop, to making 10,000 a day for Wimbledon. And every one is made fresh to order, hand cut, perfectly round – a lot of the factory ones are kind of hexagonal – and brushed with egg. We get the final order for each day on the previous afternoon, and we’ve got teams who work through the night getting them out. If there’s going to be a bit of rain the volumes go up, because that’s when people sit about eating. If it’s hot and sunny everyone’s on court watching tennis.
We occasionally get asked to bake something special. When Novak Djokovic won in 2011 we got a call on the Sunday night asking us to make a gluten-free cake to present to him on Monday morning. We put this big No1 Wimbledon winner cake together which was in all the papers.
Dipali Goenka Managing director, Welspun global brands
Christy has been licenced to produce Wimbledon’s towels since 1987, though it was supplying them even before that. We bought Christy in 2006. Welspun is based in India – the towels used to be made in Portugal, but since 2010 they have been produced in our factory in Gujarat. Every year they’re the biggest-selling items in the Wimbledon shop. We launch the following year’s towel in October – you get a lot of people wanting to buy them as Christmas presents – and then we build up the stockholding from February onwards as we build up to the championships.
We provide a range of sizes, from the key Championship towels which are the same as the ones used by the players, to smaller hand towels and face cloths. This year we’ve produced around 100,000 towels in all, and we’ll sell around 35,000 of the Championship towels. The design is similar to last year’s – we totally change them every few years – though we’ve obviously changed the date on it, and there’s a new lady’s colourway in hot pink, charcoal and chartreuse green. When they turn the towels around the reverse will be very zingy and bright.
I think they’ve become an iconic part of the event – fans want to take a little bit of Wimbledon away with them, and they see the players using the towels on centre court. The players certainly like to keep them – we supply around 6,000 for the courts and dressing rooms, which are supposed to be returned at the end of the tournament, but we only ever get around a third back.
In the last couple of weeks we’ve signed off on the 2016 towels, which are a brand new design and a new colourway for the ladies. Wimbledon are very keen that the men’s towel stays in the traditional green and purple, while the ladies’ change according to the trends. I can’t tell you much about it at this stage, but I will say that it will have a highlight of yellow.
Isabella Murray Local resident
We bought a house just around the corner from Wimbledon about 15 years ago, and we’ve been renting it out for the Championships for the last 13 years or so. Our first tenant was Taylor Dent, and we’ve had Nicole Vaidisova, Juan Martín del Potro, who used it for the Olympics as well – that was a prosperous year for us – and then when he was injured last year Tomas Berdych had it. Del Potro was going to have it again this year but when he withdrew with a wrist injury Kei Nishikori stepped in. We’ve always had them returning, until they retire.
We live in a cul-de-sac, so it’s very quiet and private. Your best bet is to rent to a player who also does Queen’s, which Del Potro did, but then he wouldn’t book for the second week of Wimbledon until he was sure he’d still be there, whereas Nishikori arrived last Saturday but he’s taken it for the full three weeks. He’s quite confident, I think.
Before they come I’ll take down all the photos of the family and totally declutter. The place has to be absolutely immaculate. It’s a pain, but it’s good to get the house sorted every year – for example our door buzzer hasn’t worked for about six months and we’ve had to get that fixed. We’ll clear some wardrobe space for them, but to be honest most players live out of a bag on the floor.
Del Potro’s a bit messy, and Berdych did drop a bit of fake tan on the carpet, but we’ve never come back and thought, ‘I never want to do this again.’ The agency will clean the house, so you get it back how you left it. Sometimes the players will leave things behind – a few pairs of trainers, or some training gear that they don’t need any more – though Vaidisova would leave a bottle of Champagne and a thank you note.
We always rent to players, because they’re just here to play tennis. Some of the international TV crews will rent houses: they tend to use them a lot more, and they might have a bit of a party. We’re lucky because my parents live locally, so we just move in with them for a couple of weeks. Before the kids started school we’d go on holiday, but now it pays for one of the school fees. We pop back to the house sometimes to water the garden. We’ve met all of the players who’ve rented it, and they’ve all without exception been really nice people.
Martin Joyce Catering consultant, Compass Group
We never advertise for staff. We’ll invite back everyone who we thought worked well last year, and we probably get 40% of them returning. All the rest is word of mouth. We’re normally fully recruited at the end of January, and then comes the huge task of vetting and verifying every single application, and allocating jobs. The big challenge is the logistics: getting the person here on the right day, in the right job, at the right time.
The players are key for us. They have two really good restaurants, one near Centre Court and one near the practice courts. They have everything cooked to order. They are getting more and more savvy in how they want to eat, when they want to eat, and how they want to eat. We have to make sure we’re up to their needs. Every year we try to improve. We have sushi chefs now making sushi fresh. Pasta will be served in sauces cooked fresh to their specifications. They have a lot of choice.
We’ll start debriefing two days after the championships end, and then we get to work on next year. We build our portfolio from July to October, and we’ll really nail down our offer in the build-up to Christmas. We go to all the other grand slams and a few of the Masters Series events, anywhere that will give us some form of benchmarking our offer and our style. They’re all totally different – the only thing that’s the same is the players.
We’ve been running the catering operation for years, but sometimes we still get taken by surprise. I wanted to do crepes one year, and we set up a really nice crepe operation, but we discovered that crepes and the British do not go very well. Then last year we introduced a slow-cooked pulled pork sandwich, and I think we sold our total volume estimate for 15 days in three. That means the chaps were left cooking pork right through the night to get on top of it.
Luke Aggas Director of tennis, Hawk-Eye innovations
I played tennis to county standard, which relative to what I watch on a daily basis isn’t great, but it’s always been an interest of mine. I was Hawk-Eye’s fifth employee when I joined in around 2004, and now there are close to 120 of us, in three cities. This year we’re going to be providing the line calling service across six courts for the first time – we’ve only ever done four courts before, but this year courts 12 and 18 have adopted the technology.
The club has built in some of the infrastructure for us, like the cabling and the camera brackets, which helps with set-up, but we’ve been here since last Monday getting everything ready.
On each of the six courts we have a review booth, similar to a commentary box, and when a match is in progress we’ll have a couple of people in that room operating the system. They log each point and create in-play statistics as well as, if there is a challenge, making sure the required information is easily and quickly retrieved. There will also be an official in the booth to supervise our work – they’ll be a line judge, a chair umpire, a supervisor or a referee – who will be able to communicate with the match umpire in case of emergency.
So we’ll have 25 staff on site during the championships, providing Hawk-Eye and also working on Smart Production, a low-cost broadcast solution which provides coverage of some of the outside courts using small, unmanned cameras where there is no space for cameramen.
As each court becomes closed, we will start to remove our equipment – it takes about five hours to remove the cameras and hardware from each court. We hope to be out of here by 10am on the Monday after the championship.
In all we’ve got 18 kits which bounce around the world covering different championships – the only permanent Hawk-Eye tennis installation is in the Slovak National Tennis Centre in Bratislava. For the moment our tennis operation is based in London, and thankfully we’ve got a couple of weeks off after Wimbledon, before we have to send a team to Queen’s for Britain’s Davis Cup tie there, which is local enough, while another crew have to go to Darwin, Australia, which is a little less convenient.
Yulia Brodskaya Paper artist and designer of this year’s official poster
The poster was supposed to bring together the traditions of Wimbledon and communicate the new start date, which from this year onwards is a week later than it used to be. So the key idea was to do something very different to previous posters in order to really bring attention to the new date.
The finished poster brings to life many of Wimbledon’s most famous icons, from the grass to the strawberries, the trophies and even an umbrella, all enclosed in an intricate tennis-ball shaped design. The main challenge was to incorporate all those elements in a harmonious way, while staying true to the well-recognised green and purple palette of Wimbledon, and at the same time making sure the new start date is clearly visible.
There’s no special trick to getting things like the numbering just right – I just spent a long time measuring, cutting and gluing to make sure they’re as perfect as hand-made paper numbers can be. I paid really close attention to the details, for example finding some special paper with texture similar to a grass lawn, and making a net out of super-thin strips of paper.
First I sketched my design, and then once that had been approved it took just over a week of non-stop work to make the finished piece. I had to make some changes as I went along – for example I had a problem with the tennis balls, which I initially made using a technique similar to the strawberries, but they looked a bit of place. Eventually I found a different way of making them, and now they look more integrated and visually appealing.
There’s a making-of video on the Wimbledon website where you can still see the old balls. The artwork proved to be really popular, so I’ve been invited to continue the collaboration and become an artist in residence for this year’s championships. I’ll get to explore every corner of the ground and I’ll have a chance to see a few matches – including the ladies’ final – and then I’ll create some paper artwork inspired by my Wimbledon experience, which will go on permanent display in the clubhouse.
