Where to play tennis in London during Wimbledon

→ Where to Play Tennis in London, 42 public courts across 5 regions

Every year around the last Monday in June, the same thing happens in London. The shop windows go themed. The supermarkets sell out of strawberries by Wednesday. The cabbie has a view on the British No. 1. And somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million Londoners decide that this is finally the year to take tennis seriously, only to find that walking onto a tennis court in this city is a social puzzle dressed up as a logistical one.

The members' club door

The first instinct, for most people, is the private clubs. The All England Club is the obvious one. Full membership is capped at 375, a cap that reflects the number of seats in the original Worple Road stand from before the club moved to Church Road in 1922. You do not apply. There is no list to join. You are invited, usually after a lifetime of unflashy service to British tennis administration: committees, the LTA, decades of grassroots stewardship that does not get televised. Spots open when someone dies or resigns. Neither happens often. Oh, and if you win the tournament, you are also invited.

Queen's, by contrast, has a process. Queen's takes a proposer and a seconder, two current members willing to vouch for your character in writing, plus £15,000 for a share in the club. The waiting list is around fifteen years long, and full membership has been suspended for new applicants since March 2019, on the broadly diplomatic grounds that the wait was getting embarrassing.

Hurlingham, in Fulham, runs the same architecture in a different postcode. Nomination only. The waiting list is around thirty years long, and is now closed to anyone who is not the child of a current member. The grass tennis courts are immaculate, the croquet lawn faces the Thames, and the closest most of us will get is being invited as a guest, which usually gets you lunch in the gardens but not a court.

Roehampton is the most accessible of the four, in the sense that you might still be alive when your name comes up. The wait is around four years. The one-off joining fee starts at £3,435. The 2026 tennis subscription for a full adult is £2,785, every year. The club is excellent and the tennis programme is real.

None of these places, on reflection, are mostly selling tennis. They are selling membership of something most people cannot join, and the tennis is the bait.

The actual answer

The honest secret of this city is that London has more public tennis courts than any other capital in Europe. Most of them are bookable online, open year-round, and cost less than the glass of wine you might drink afterwards. Hyde Park has six floodlit courts ten minutes from Oxford Circus. Battersea Park has nineteen. Holland Park has six. Bookings open on the LTA website or via the local borough portal and the process takes about three minutes.

We have put together a guide of forty-two of them, across five regions of London, with addresses, surfaces, booking links, the coffee shop you should go to before, and the pub you should go to after. → Where to Play Tennis in London, 42 public courts across 5 regions.

The grass question

The other instinct that arrives in Wimbledon fortnight, and is the harder one to satisfy, is the urge to play on grass. Grass is the surface most British people associate with summer tennis. It is the surface the fortnight is televised on. And it is, by some distance, the rarest of the publicly available surfaces in London.

Almost every grass court in this city is private. Hurlingham has them. Queen's has them. Roehampton has them. The All England Club has them, obviously, and is currently not letting anyone near them. Cumberland Lawn Tennis Club in West Hampstead has four. Holland Park Lawn Tennis Club in Kensington has three. Both are private and both sit behind the same kind of door as the four above. This is not a full directory of the London members' clubs with grass, but if you came here looking for a court to play on, you can take it that any other private grass facility in this city operates such that you can get on the grass as a member, or a guest of a member.

The exception is Raynes Park, a fifteen-minute walk from the station of the same name. The All England Club's community sport arm runs sixteen grass courts there. Through the build-up to the Championships and most of the fortnight itself, the grass courts are reserved for player practice across the grass-court swing. They reopen to community booking in the closing days of the tournament, once the singles draws shrink and the demand from the pros drops. From that point the standard rules apply: thirteen days in advance, £14 peak and £7 off-peak, daily from 11am, weather permitting. The booking page is here; registering takes about two minutes.

That is roughly it for true public grass in this city. The slots fill inside the first week the courts reopen. The unspoken truth, which the fortnight's marketing does not foreground, is that the surface most people associate with childhood summers is also the surface that hides the most about your game. The bounce is lower, the pace is harder to read, the patterns are different. The hard courts most of London actually plays on tell you more about what you are doing right and what you may need to improve on.

What to do with the session

If you play at any of the forty-two courts in the guide, film the session. A phone behind the baseline is enough. That is the entire access barrier All Court has. There is no nominator, no joining fee, and no waitlist that closes inside a generation. The whole point is that any player with a phone and a court can have a touring professional watch the session back, tag every shot, give you an All Court Rating, and tell them what to work on next.

The waitlist exists so that each session gets a real pro and real time as we scale up. Access is being released in batches so the person watching your video is a touring professional doing a proper review, not a backlog being processed. Join the waitlist at allcourt.club/join, and you will hear from us as soon as your batch opens.

The guide tells you where to play. All Court tells you what happened while you were playing.