Proposals to treble size of venue face fresh clash over status of golf club site
Allies and Morrison’s plans to treble the size of the Wimbledon Championships grounds are set to return to the High Court this Friday as campaigners continue their battle to overturn the £200m scheme.
The Royal Courts of Justice in London has set 16 January as the start of up to six days of hearings over the legal status of the land on which the expansion would be built, with a decision expected within the next two to three months.
The case between the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) and local campaign group Save Wimbledon Park (SWP) is set to be the latest clash in a long-running dispute over the scheme, which would be the largest expansion in the club’s 158-year history.
The scheme would extend the grounds of the annual grand slam over a neighbouring golf club site, adding 38 new tennis courts, an 8,000-seat show court and extensive parkland.
But it has faced sustained opposition from local campaigners who claim the proposed site is held in a public statutory trust and should be classed as Metropolitan Open Land, despite the site being used as a private golf course since 1898.
The latest case comes six months after the High Court dismissed SWP’s judicial review of the Greater London Authority’s decision to approve the expansion following a year-long planning saga.
In that case, SWP had argued the GLA had made “errors of law and planning policy” when deputy London mayor Jules Pipe ruled that the project could go ahead despite continued uncertainty over the status of the land.
The AELTC has admitted that the proposed development would be “incompatible” if a statutory trust over the land was found to exist.
The case will hinge on whether the private golf club could still be classed as public land when it was acquired by the AELTC in 1993 from Merton council.
Under the 1972 Local Government Act, public recreation trust land disposed of by a public authority would also transfer ownership of the trust to the purchaser if the council did not undertake a statutory consultation process, which Merton council had failed to do.
But a 2023 case in the Supreme Court clarified that land sold in breach of the statutory process would still be subject to the special protection of public recreation land.
While SWP argue that almost the entire Wimbledon Park Estate was subject to the statutory trust, the AELTC contend the site was never part of the trust as it was leased to a private golf club.
Kevin O’Neil, chair of The Wimbledon Society, said: “The Wimbledon Society has consistently opposed the AELTC’s deeply damaging plans, which would irreversibly harm one of London’s most highly protected areas of open space.
“We have worked closely with the Save Wimbledon Park campaign for many years and now welcome the opportunity to test our long-held view that the land is safeguarded by a statutory recreation trust.”
In his ruling last July, Pipe concluded the development would be ““inappropriate” on public land but in practice the site “has been extremely constricted for the past century, principally to fee-paying golfers”.
The AELTC’s chair Deborah Evans has said the scheme was needed to “ensure that Wimbledon maintains its status at the pinnacle of the sport”.
The plans for the site also include seven new maintenance buildings and a pedestrian bridge crossing Wimbledon Park Lake, which would be altered and expanded with a de-culverted channel running through part of the parkland alongside the new tennis courts.
The AELTC has been approached for comment.
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