Wimbledon opens today, and Southfields has dressed for it.
Nearly every shop on Replingham and Wimbledon Park Roads has transformed its window for the Championships fortnight, from hand-painted murals to a podiatrist’s pun-filled paintings. We have photographed the top 16 and seeded them. Now it’s your turn to decide the winner in your own version of the Wimbledon knockout competition.
The contenders
Will it be SOAK? The nail salon has filled its window with a hand-painted woman in a dress made of tennis balls, beneath the challenge: ‘Nails as good as your game.’ Could it be Andrews, whose estate agent window carries a full painted tree hung with tennis-ball fruit, a dog resting at the base? Or SW Blooms, the florist, which has constructed a crossed-rackets sculpture from moss and agapanthus, the kind of effort that would not look out of place at the club itself?
Or does the title belong to Southfields Footcare? The podiatry clinic has a fishbowl of balls, a pair of legs in tennis shoes, and an LED sign: ‘any foot fault, we will set them right.’ It has been waiting twelve months for this exact moment.
There’s more. Will the winner be Carter Jonas with botanical balls and strawberries? KFH in pink with ‘Game Set Match’? Wine Rack with Lanson displays and ‘Wimbledon sold here’? Cook with chalk rackets and a trophy on the glass? Loney Miller with hand-painted strawberries, fizz and rackets? The Olive Garden with its bunting-dressed terrace? Or Tesco Express, flanking its entrance with two Lanson ball sculptures that stop you mid-stride?
FARA, the charity shop, has a white swirl mural, a carpet of fake grass, around 50 tennis balls, the Championships poster, and a ‘Game, Set, Celebrate!’ event on the first day of the fortnight, Monday 29 June.
One contender has gone a step further. John D Wood is in the bracket, but it has also created its own Wimbledon game: guess which of six players would choose which of six dream properties, with a Fortnum & Mason hamper for the winner. Enter at their Wimbledon competition page. Enjoyed our knockout? Their quiz is worth a go.
None of this is accidental. Southfields is the tube station the world is directed to use for the Championships. During the fortnight, more than three times the usual number of passengers pass through its gates. From the station to the All England Club is roughly 15 minutes on foot, and the route takes spectators straight past these shopfronts, which means two tides of ticket-holders, players’ families, officials and day-trippers wash past twice a day, every day, for two weeks. Every shop on Replingham Road knows it.
Southfields has form for this. In December, four businesses dressed Replingham Road for the new year. In April, an Easter trail ran the length of the high street. Much of it is brought together by the Southfields Business Forum, which commissioned an illustrated street map of the high street by local artist Jo Corlett, displayed at the station exit, and coordinates the year-round effort that makes Wimbledon fortnight the biggest moment in the Southfields calendar. For the estate agents, the international crowd arriving at the station is exactly their market. For the cafés, the off-licence and the restaurant, it is summer trade, arriving reliably every morning for a fortnight.
Come back and see how Southfields votes: the competition runs live through to the final on Sunday 12 July.
