Putney’s tennis courts have been shut for two years. Fixing them started a war

Everyone agrees that the community tennis courts on Putney Lower Common – a quiet, closed off corner by All Saints Church and primary school – need resurfacing and updating. They are pretty much unplayable and have sat unused, net posts torn out, pavilion rotting, and the fencing ageing for just under two years.

The fix is not complicated: new tarmac, new fencing, a bit of low-level lighting. An application for a complete refresh went to the council in June and public comment on the application officially closed last night.

What should have been a routine matter in a quiet part of Putney, however, has instead erupted into an all-out war between residents who live all around the courts and the charity that owns the land.

No less than 215 comments to Wandsworth Council (split 129 in support; 77 against; 9 on the fence), a twenty-page letter from a firm of Cambridge solicitors, a commissioned acoustic report, and a letter from the charity’s chair personally correcting what he calls “factual inaccuracies” about the plan. Almost none of it is about tarmac.

Wimbledon and Putney Commons Conservators (WPCC) has run the Common since an Act of Parliament in 1871. It applied in December to resurface the courts and hand day-to-day running to All Star Tennis, the company that already manages six sites and around 28 courts across Wandsworth. Richard Buxton Solicitors, a firm based in Cambridge, some sixty miles away, and acting for residents of Erpingham Road and Egliston Mews, which back onto the courts, filed a lengthy objection. The application “is intended specifically to unlock the ability for All Star Tennis to operate there, thereby introducing constant, intensive play at a level the site has never seen before,” it argued.

WPCC’s chairman, Mauro Mattiuzzo, responded: the arrangement is “a shared occupation and management arrangement documented by way of licence rather than lease… not the handover objectors describe.”

The acoustic report reaches for suitably scientific language to describe the actual sound in question: tennis. Noise from the courts, it finds, “includes characterful noise that is likely to attract and hold attention” – much more poetic than you usually find in an acoustics report.

Stuck in the middle

The council’s summary of the application itself undercuts most of the argument before they start:

Existing land use: F.2, Local Community Uses. Proposed land use: F.2, Local Community Uses. No change of use is being sought.

The council simply cannot decide on most of what the commenters are asking. Resurfacing, fencing and bollard lighting are planning matters; who runs the courts, what they charge, and how much time gets set aside for coaching and camps are not: that’s a private agreement between a charity and a company, with no planning lever.

But what the council can decide is was will make that agreement viable or not: the surfacing, the fencing, the lighting, the trees, the heritage impact, the effect on neighbours from noise and use. What All Star Tennis charges, how much court time goes to coaching and camps, whether the school next door gets access, and whether the Conservators are acting within their powers under the 1871 Act, that’s another matter which has played out regardless.

WPCC has declined to publish the terms of its arrangement with All Star Tennis. “Whilst the detailed commercial terms remain confidential,” Mattiuzzo wrote to the council on 4 August, “WPCC can confirm that All Star Tennis will not be granted exclusive possession of the premises.” The licence, he says, will be “terminable at will on notice by WPCC,” and “community access to the tennis courts will continue following refurbishment.” That answers three of the biggest objections directly, and in the charity’s own words.

What it does not answer, on its own account, is what anyone will actually pay to play.

The courts closed in September 2024, three years after residents had spent a year demanding something be done about courts nobody could play on, and by the time the closure was confirmed, the net post holes had been cemented in, which put the rest beyond casual use too. WPCC announced last July that All Star Tennis would run them, pay-and-play on all five, and at the time nobody objected This application went in that December. It was marked invalid in January, over an ownership certificate rather than anything to do with tennis, and sat that way for five months.

The December application was however the beginning of the rebellion: the original plans had the new courts stretch up to the back garden walls of the residents of Erpingham Road; beautiful houses with active and retired professionals living in, including at least one judge. Those houses have right of access from the back gates to the alleyway that leads onto the main road. The original plans sought to claim that land for itself – possibly a drafting error – but one that provided tennis players with easy access to the pavilion at the back of the area, rather than having to cut through the courts themselves. The encroachment on people’s land did not go unnoticed.

The current application – which does not have people constantly using locals’ land as a pathway was registered on 19 June. It took eleven days for the row to begin: one comment on 30 June, then a wave through July.

By the time comments stopped arriving, they had come from both directions at once, and from very different distances. Objectors live, on average, 290 metres from the courts – roughly a three-minute stroll. Supporters live a median 1,555 metres away- the best part of a mile. Thirty-five of the 74 objections are from the immediate vicinity of the courts themselves; forty-six of the 124 support comments come from more than three kilometres out, including Balham, Northcote, Battersea, Tooting and Southfields. The people who will hear the tennis are against it. The people who just want somewhere to play are for it.

Read enough of the 129 support comments and a pattern turns up: almost nobody defending this scheme thinks the status quo was fine. Dr Adrian Paterson, of Deodar Road, remembers growing up nearby and still having to travel for a game:

“As a kid, to not be disappointed I used to have to get the bus to Wimbledon Common to find any usable courts.”

Nichola Lawrence put it more bluntly about the site as it stands now: “These courts were almost unplayable and the guy who managed them was unresponsive to people who wanted to play on them.” Aga Malik’s comment supplied the argument in miniature:

“Without long-term investment and professional management, facilities like these inevitably deteriorate.”

Nobody writing in support thinks a charity running courts on a shoestring was working, and after two years of cemented net posts, it is hard to argue with them.

Once the terms went unpublished, the planning portal became the only public forum left, and every grievance landed there whether it belonged there or not. John Cameron, of Erpingham Road, wrote that WPCC had “refused to disclose its agreement with All Star Tennis,” so “neither residents nor Wandsworth can determine whether the long-standing contractual protection for neighbouring amenity has been retained.” Elsewhere he goes further: the Conservators, he writes, “possess no general power to undertake activities simply because they consider them desirable,” and anything outside their statutory powers is “ultra vires and unlawful.”

Peter Breitenbach, a few doors along, made the same case: the application “masks an agreement… to transfer the benefit of this public amenity to All Star Tennis, a private, for-profit company.” Buxton’s letter presses the same ground formally, arguing the Conservators risk acting beyond their statutory powers under the 1871 Act altogether: a serious, contested claim the planning process cannot settle. The charity is separately rewriting its 150-year-old rulebook, on the levy and parking, not on this power, so it settles nothing here.

It is also, on the numbers, a lopsided argument to be having. Nearly two supporters for every objector wrote in. And nobody used a template: not one of the 215 comments is identical to another. Supporters wrote short support statements; objectors much longer responses. One side endorsed. The other argued. The word “commercial” turns up in 49 of the 77 objections and just one of the 129 in support; two camps, not really having the same conversation.

Although the WPCC won’t reveals the terms, one thing we can note is All Star Tennis’s current price list, published for its six existing Wandsworth sites. It charges non-members £7.50 an hour off-peak and £16 an hour at peak times: the £16 figure is the number that has been circulating locally as the price at the new courts, on a laminated poster cable-tied to the fence and in the WhatsApp groups where this row has also been running. Neither WPCC nor All Star Tennis has confirmed that £16 is what Putney Lower Common will actually charge. But it is not a number anyone invented. It is All Star’s own published rate, everywhere else it already operates.

A former governor of All Saints’ primary school, which backs onto the courts, says her pupils have never once been let on them.

“It was with joy when we saw the signs up that Community Tennis would be returning,” Eve Bradshaw wrote, “but that doesn’t seem to be what is happening.”

Neil Vass, of Erpingham Road, says that when the previous operator’s licence ended, WPCC took the doors off the court fencing altogether, because the Common had to stay open to everyone. The new plan is a booking app.

Everyone in this argument, it is worth saying plainly, wants the courts fixed. Des Willcocks has played on them for 24 years and objects to the deal anyway. “I support investment in the facilities,” he wrote, “and have no objection to resurfacing the courts or replacing fencing where necessary.” The tarmac, this week, is exactly as cracked as it was before any of this started.

Someone has cable-tied a laminated poster to the fence about it. Underneath the small print about the 1871 Act, someone else has written, in biro: BRAVO!!!

What happens next

The comment period has closed, so there is nothing further to submit on this application. A decision is still to come, from Laura Nieves, Wandsworth’s case officer for 2025/4618.

The planning process cannot rule on whether WPCC is entitled to license the courts to a private operator under the 1871 Act. That question, if anyone pursues it, goes to the Charity Commission, not the council.