Stop that racket! Padel craze sparks volley of objections

The latest rival to tennis is booming in popularity. But not all the clubs’ neighbours are delighted, discovers Andrew Anthony

- Andrew Anthony

Across the affluent suburbs and well-heeled country towns and cities of England the sound of "gun-fire" - 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 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".