Wimbledon’s expansion meets its match

Photography by Nick Ballon

Ruby has been a vocal and prominent opponent of the plans. “I’ll do whatever it takes to save those glorious trees,” she told me, plainly. “If it goes ahead, all of these beautiful trees will be cut down.” We first met in March, at a Save Wimbledon Park meeting held at St Barnabas Church, near to the Wimbledon complex. She was sitting in the front row while people spoke, and then she too addressed the room. (An eight-year-old local primary school-child followed her.) There were around 250 people in attendance, all members of a collective of more than 1,000 well-connected neighbours who have raised over £130,000 to bring about a judicial review of the planning decision. Campaigners maintain serious questions about the original judgment: Was it lawful to grant planning permission? Was anything amiss? They claim the AELTC faces the threat of “triple jeopardy” in court – three key elements of planning rules could have been misapplied, they argue. If the court finds just one error, the planning application could be thrown out.

Ruby moved to Wimbledon in 1993, following the death of her husband, the screenwriter Peter Frye. “I loved it immediately,” she said of the apartment. “So light and bright, and the view, of course.” We were drinking tea and eating chocolate digestives, looking out across the park, which is Grade-II listed. Last year, the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club (AELTC) was granted planning permission to build a 10-storey, 8,000-seat show-court stadium on a large section of the parkland visible from Ruby’s windows, as well as 38 additional grass courts. Most of the development will sit on a former private golf course across from the championships’ current site. The transformation will more than double Wimbledon’s existing 17-hectare footprint to 40 hectares, as it bids to keep up with competing Grand Slam tournaments in New York, Paris and Melbourne, all of which have undergone substantial expansions and upgrades in recent years.

So while tennis professionals have been battling it out on Centre Court over the past two weeks, the AELTC has been closely watching the judicial review’s proceedings inside the oak-panelled rooms of the Royal Courts of Justice, a few miles away on the Strand, in central London. Several campaigners gathered outside the court, wielding placards that read, “Green not Greed” and “Love Tennis, Hate Concrete.”

Ruby is tiny. So small that I felt I had to sit down immediately every time I met her, so as not to be towering over her. Her voice is theatrical and croaky, and she is exceptional at impressions. (I’d describe her overall vibe as that of a cheeky teenager.) She is also a “huge” tennis fan, she told me. Like millions of others, she watches Wimbledon live on television, and attends games in person at least once every tournament. (She had tickets for the men’s quarter-finals this year.) But still, she refuses to concede the fight: just because the championships are an exceptional spectacle of sporting achievement does not mean the AELTC should be allowed to build over additional parkland. When I asked what she would do if the judicial review backed the decision to approve the AELTC’s plans, she said she would be prepared to take direct action, which included chaining herself to one of her beloved trees. (She already knew which one: a young English oak justified for removal by the AELTC as a “young tree suppressing the growth of braces on the west side of Veteran English Oak T431”.)

In Ruby’s apartment, I noticed two working computers, as well as handwritten notes stuck to surfaces. “Smell gas, call…” one read. On another, she had written the names and birthdays of 54 step-grandchildren and two step-great grandchildren – a memory aid. There were also badges, pleasingly handmade, that read, “Save Wimbledon Park.”

“It worked for the suffragettes,” Ruby said. “They weren’t afraid and neither am I.” When I raised the fact she relies on handrails to navigate her flat, she mentioned concern about having to stand up for too long, but then relaxed. “There’s a nice young man who has said he will swap places with me at night,” she said. “So I can go to bed and chain myself back up the next day.”

Aware of Ruby’s influence, the AELTC recently sent a representative round to “reassure” her about the impact of the development. It didn’t work. “She said that all of this will be flattened,” Ruby told me of the visitor, pointing at the landscape beyond her window. “Between here and the lake will be eight tennis courts. It will take between five and 10 years. There will be polluting lorries driving past every 10 minutes. I’ll have to listen to chainsaws cutting down the trees.” She went on, not without drama, “I don’t want to be alive to see it. It is this view that makes me want to get up in the morning.”

Ruby has been described as the Save Wimbledon Park campaign group’s “secret weapon”. “She’s a lovely, sweet, polite, gentle lady,” Christopher Coombe, a retired lawyer who is advising the campaigners on the judicial review, told me, before adding, “Some might dismiss her as only that, but they’d be wrong. She’s a fighter.”

Coombe, 72, has lived near St Mary’s Church, the spire of which is often seen in ariel views of Wimbledon coverage, for 32 years. The day we spoke, at another Save Wimbledon Park campaign meeting, he wore a dark suit with a crisp white shirt. Wimbledon’s managers had been invited to address the meeting, but no one turned up. A member of the campaign group propped a tennis racquet on an empty chair and scrawled “AELTC” on a piece of A4 paper.

Before he retired, Coombe mostly acted for property developers. Now he feels “like poacher turned gamekeeper,” he told me. “I’m not against development and progress – or tennis. But what is happening here is turning that old green golf course – one of the most protected green spaces in London – into an industrial-scale tennis entertainment complex.”

Wimbledon’s plan, which had been approved by Merton Council, but rejected by Wandsworth Council (the land falls within the boundaries of both boroughs), had been referred to the Greater London Assembly (GLA). Last year, in a 221-page report, the GLA approved plans after finding “no material considerations that are considered to justify the refusal of consent”. In a statement, the GLA said: “The Mayor believes this scheme will bring a significant range of benefits including economic, social and cultural benefits to the local area, the wider capital and the UK economy, creating new jobs and cementing Wimbledon’s reputation as the greatest tennis competition in the world.” A line added, “It is inappropriate for the Mayor to comment further ahead of court proceedings.”

Debbie Jevans, 65, is chair of the AELTC and a former professional tennis player who reached the mixed doubles quarter finals at Wimbledon in 1978 with her future husband Andrew Jarrett. She hit back at the campaigners’ claims that the project will destroy the parkland. “What we’re doing is for the community and the championships,” she told me recently. “We are turning what was a private golf course into a public park and that can only be a good thing for the community.” Speaking in her office at the heart of the championships’ site, Jevans said that while the former golf club forms part of Wimbledon Park, it has never been open to the public. If the AELTC’s plans are approved, some of that land will be opened to the general public for the first time. “I live locally,” she told me. “It has been frustrating me for years that I can’t walk across that land [the former golf course] to the club,” adding, “In the future you’ll be able to.”

Jevans dismissed the campaigners’ description of her plans as an industrial-scale tennis entertainment complex. “Those words keep being used disingenuously,” she said. “It is not an industrial tennis complex, it is maintaining the openness of 23 acres of land in perpetuity. There is a stadium, I can’t deny that, but the rest is grass tennis courts and one maintenance facility that is underground. We are doing everything we can to not disturb the landscape.”

The AELTC has promised campaigners, who include the comedian Andy Hamilton and several prominent London lawyers, that the “Parkland” stadium court will be “a world-class building matching the beauty of its surroundings and paying tribute to the site’s rich history”. The plans, which the club said would enhance its “tennis in an English garden” image, also include several ancillary buildings and 9.4km of roads and paths. Jevans added that Ruby may be exaggerating the number of trees that will be felled. “I want to be absolutely clear,” she told me. “We will be removing 300 dead or dying trees, but this will protect other trees, and we’re planting 1,500 new ones.” The project, she added, will allow local people to play on at least seven of the new grass courts, and will improve the lake, which Capability Brown designed for the gardens of the 1st Earl Spencer’s manor house in the 1500s. “That lake has never ever been de-silted,” Jevans said. “We will de-silt it. It is full of pesticides from when it was a private golf course. We want to give back to the local community.”

For the AELTC, the stakes of this dispute stretch far beyond this green space. As Jevans put it, the expansion plans are vital if Wimbledon is to maintain its coveted place “at the pinnacle of world tennis”. It has been the world’s leading tennis championship since Spencer Gore won the first Gentlemen’s Singles contest held here on 19 July 1877, in front of a crowd of about 200. “There is a competitive sporting landscape,” Jevans said. “You have to keep evolving and we have been inhibited from doing that.”

The championships have, of course, been underway over the past two weeks and, while the average TV viewer might not see any issues, Jevans mentioned concerns with space. “Looking around at the players, everyone is so excited to be here,” she said. “But we can’t offer everything to them – and the fans – that we would like.” The expansion would allow her to bring the championships’ qualifying rounds from Roehampton Community Sport Centre, located three miles to the northwest, to the real Wimbledon. “We are the only Grand Slam that doesn’t have qualifying on site,” she told me. It will also solve several other space issues. “We can’t offer enough practice courts. Players have to share. And we can’t invite more of the community to watch. We are an island site – we have nowhere to grow.”

The AELTC’s vision for the expansion goes back at least 32 years, to when it bought the freehold from Merton council for £5.2m. It had leased the land to Wimbledon Park Golf Club all the way up until 2041. But, eager to expand the championships more quickly, the AELTC offered the golf club’s members increasingly large amounts of money to take it over sooner. Eventually, in 2018, the golf club members – who included Piers Morgan, Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, and former cabinet secretary Lord O’Donnell – voted through a £65m sale. Each of the 758 members collected an £85,000 windfall.

The most contentious of the campaign group’s “triple jeopardy” threats is a “statutory public recreation trust covenant” placed on the land when Merton council sold it to the AELTC in 1993. The covenant prevented “the use of the land otherwise than for leisure or recreation purposes or as an open space”. The AELTC said that the covenant is “not a matter considered in planning,” while Jevans argued that it is “fundamentally there to protect public interest, and to ensure what we have planned is in the public interest.” (“We believe wholeheartedly that it is,” she said.)

However, the campaigners’ meticulous documentary historians unearthed a 1993 statement from the then-chairman of the AELTC, John Curry: “We completely understand and support everyone’s determination to keep the land open and we have purchased the land on that basis.” Tony Colman, the then-leader of Merton borough council, added at the time: “This council is resolute that the land will be retained as open space. All England has bought the land knowing this is our policy and is aware that we would not allow development of the site.”

The long-running battle over the future of the park has become a key issue at all levels of local politics. Paul Kohler MP, a Liberal Democrat and long-term opponent of the plans, won the Wimbledon parliamentary seat at the 2024 general election, ending 19 years of Conservative control. Referring to the covenant, Kohler said, “Call me old-fashioned, but I believe promises should be kept.” The fight over the park’s future has also tested the friendships of many people living in the surrounding streets, where it’s hard to find houses priced at under £1m. While the Save Wimbledon Park group has attracted international media attention for its fight against the development, many local people support the AELTC’s plans, albeit more quietly.

“This is an opportunity for future generations to create something on land that has never been open to the public,” said Thomas Moulton, 68, a retired travel agent a retired travel agent and ESL teacher who has lived in Wimbledon Village since 1979, and is married to former Conservative councillor and Mayor of Merton Oonagh Moulton. “We have the opportunity to change it into part of a very successful tennis championship that is a wealth creator for the area.” But many of his friends disagree. “A lot of them have signed the petitions and go to the demonstrations,” he said. “But we’re all very civil. I try to understand their concerns.” He said he appreciates that there would be disruption, inconvenience and mess – that there will be “short-term pain,” as he described it. “I don’t want the lorries and dust,” he went on. “But there will be a long-term gain, and a legacy for future generations.”

The high court is expected to make its decision on the judicial review within the next few weeks. Jevans, who was in court for the opening of the review, refused to speculate about the outcome of the case, saying only that “We are very positive and very confident that the GLA took its decision with due diligence.”

Whichever way it goes, neither side shows any sign of giving up on the fight. Ruby, Coombe and the other campaigners have two further court challenges planned if they lose this one. The AELTC has already sunk close to £100m into plans for the expansion, and has millions more in reserve to continue the fight, both in the courtroom and in the court of public opinion.

The decision could have wider implications. It will be a rare planning ruling on what can – or cannot – be built on protected green space like this land, which is classified as Metropolitan Open Land and has the same legal status as the green belt. What happens in SW19 could well be applied to future planning battles over much-loved green oases across the country, from Penzance to Preston.

The AELTC has done little to the land since buying the golf club in 2018. You can still make out the fairways, bunkers and greens behind the fences, which are regularly patrolled by security guards, who have perhaps been told to keep a keen eye out for a 100-year-old tree-loving actress. “I’m no match for a big security guard,” Ruby told me, as she showed me out into the gathering dusk. “But I will still try to get to that tree.”