Across the affluent suburbs and well-heeled country towns and cities of England the sound of “gunfire” – or the fear of it – has been ringing out in recent months. From Bath to Weybridge and Winchester to Lytham St Annes a street battle of sorts has been waged as desirable neighbourhoods seek to repel what they see as a menacing new threat to the peace: the sport of padel.
“When the best players play, I can only describe it as like a bullet going right by you,” says Nick Christou, whose garden is a few yards from two padel courts at Hazelwood sports club in Enfield, north London.
Invented in Mexico in 1969, and said to be the fastest growing sport in the world, padel is a mashup of tennis and squash played within a mesh-and-glass caged court with what look like oversized table-tennis bats – the kind of rackets, according to offended ears, that make a racket.
The Lawn Tennis Association took over the running of the sport six years ago and instituted a plan to “integrate padel into the fabric of tennis in Britain”. After lockdown, when people were looking for new outdoor distractions, the novelty of padel, and its adaptability for all skill levels, helped propel its popularity.
As recently as 2011 there was just one padel court in the whole of the UK. Last year there were 450 and hundreds more are planned, though not without local resistance.
At the Landsown tennis club in Bath, for example, a planning application to replace a tennis court with two padel courts was rejected last year after local residents objected. They claimed that unlike the familiar summery thwack of a tennis ball on cow-gut, the hard stringless racket of padel produces an “intolerable” noise “like gunfire”.
Similar plans to build three padel courts at St George’s Hill lawn tennis club near Weybridge in Surrey were shelved last month because of complaints from locals about the potential disturbance. Instead the club will now build the courts within a soundproofed indoor structure.
Graham Taaffe runs Padel Tennis London and opened his first court 10 years ago at Hazelwood in Enfield, the tennis club from which he leases the land. Bookings slowly grew until he opened a second court in 2021 – and that’s when the complaints started.
“It was just one person,” he says. “The council gave us planning permission. They knew what to expect from the first court. Enfield says it wants to improve health and tackle obesity, but now it’s threatening to close the padel down.”
That one person – Christou – says that in general he is supportive of sport. “We’ve lived here for 30 years and the tennis has never been a problem,” says his wife, Janet. It was after lockdown, the couple say, that the padel courts became oppressively busy. “Now we literally cannot use our garden,” says Christou.
Following his complaints, Enfield council ordered a noise abatement notice, which they suspended when Taaffe agreed to install a sound barrier. When that was deemed ineffective, the order was reissued.
In an effort to placate Christou, Taaffe asked the expert from Enfield council what sound reduction was required to reach the acceptable decibel level. “He said, ‘Oh no, there’s no level. It’s subject to our opinion whether it’s a noise nuisance.’ So it’s entirely subjective,” says Taaffe.
Christou points out that three different experts have measured the sound. “They all agree it’s too noisy.”
Taaffe acknowledges that padel is louder than tennis but says that at root it’s an argument about the sound of a sports game emerging from a sports club. “If you live next to a railway line, you’re going to hear trains,” he says. The dispute now transfers to a different kind of court – an appeals tribunal – in April, where Taaffe will seek to have the notice withdrawn. If he fails, padel may come to an end in Enfield.
A few miles south in Hampstead Garden Suburb, in north London, is Northway lawn tennis club. It nestles in the corner of a charming sliver of parkland with a creek running through the middle. It features four rather worn courts and an old-fashioned wooden pavilion, where last week a group of women in their seventies had just completed a game of doubles.
“We’ve been playing here for ever,” said one them, who did not want to give her name. They were upset that the club was seeking council permission to turn itself into a padel club. “We don’t want padel here,” said another. “It’s too noisy. And the panels will block the view of the willows.”
Nevertheless, everyone agreed that the club has seen better days. They recalled the halcyon era when it was run by Angela Buxton, the 1956 Wimbledon ladies doubles champion. Membership has declined over the years, and now there are five pristine tennis courts on the other side of the creek built by the local council.
Vince Ranson, who runs Northway, admits that he can’t compete with these gleaming courts. He sees padel as a lifeline. “It would be good for the community,” he says. A young couple who rent a house bordering the club suggest that anyone who wants to play could make the short drive to the padel court at Brent Cross. the huge urban no-man’s where the M1 and the North Circular meet.
A few doors along Steve Leapman is of the same mind. “I’ve heard padel. It’s a loud, loud noise,” he says. “I think it will affect the wildlife.”
As the game continues to grow, many tennis clubs will be tempted to turn underused courts into glass cages. For some it could even be a matter of survival. Either the new sport is going to become part of the contemporary soundscape – fitting in somewhere between leaf blowers and police helicopters – or it will have to seek refuge in more acoustically suitable settings like, say, firing ranges.
But if the gathering armies of protesters have their way, Northway won’t be the only club that finds itself up a creek without padel.
