The five tennis courts on Putney Lower Common have been closed since September 2024. The tarmac is cracked. Every net post has been pulled out and its hole cemented over. Two of the courts were unplayable long before they were shut down – and everyone wants them fixed.
A plan to resurface them however has turned into a much bigger battle: whether anyone is allowed to actually charge for tennis on the courts; if the courts can be locked; and whether the old tennis arrangement, which ran for a decade, was even legal. Intriguingly, both sides of the dispute agree it was in fact illegal – but disagree over why.
There is, of course, a deeper underlying reason for how the seemingly simple issue of court resurfacing has developed into something much larger. And that can be traced back to decisions make a decade ago – in 2014 – decisions that the charity which owns the courts has never quite got clear of.
The deal nobody objected to
Putney’s green space comes in two kinds. Most of it belongs to the council: Leader’s Gardens, Wandsworth Park, King George’s Park, ordinary parks run under ordinary council rules. Putney Lower Common is not one of those. It belongs to a Victorian charity, the Wimbledon and Putney Commons Conservators, which has held it since 1871 under a private Act of Parliament written to stop the land being enclosed, built on or sold.
The courts sit in a quiet corner of it, by All Saints Church and its primary school, backing onto the gardens of Erpingham Road and Egliston Mews. For decades they were a small club. Then the courts slowly rotted, and in September 2024 they shut, after a year of residents demanding that something be done. It was a contentious removal with the previous operator, according to reports, being physically removed.
In July 2025 the charity announced a fix. All Star Tennis, which already runs six sites and around 28 courts across Wandsworth, would resurface all five and reopen them for pay and play. We reported it as good news at the time. Everyone seemed happy that tennis would finally return.
The planning application went in that December – and was marked invalid in January. The plans encroached on people’s private land – the back of their homes – and that’s when things started to go wrong. The plans sat for five months. New ones were eventually registered on 19 June. Eleven days later, the first objection arrived. And then came the war that broke out in July: 215 comments, a twenty-page letter from a Cambridge law firm, an acoustic report paid for by neighbours, and a letter from the charity’s chairman correcting what he called factual inaccuracies.
Hardly any of it was about tarmac.
Nobody will say what it costs
What the neighbours object to is not five resurfaced courts. It is five courts run as a business: coaching timetables, school block bookings, holiday camps, in a corner that used to be quiet. Des Willcocks has played there for 24 years and objects to the new plans. “I support investment in the facilities,” he wrote, “and have no objection to resurfacing the courts.”
Both sides – for and against the proposed solution – agree the courts need replacing. They were left to decay by a charity running them on a shoestring, and an operator brings money, maintenance and somebody whose job it is to stop the surface cracking again. “Without long-term investment and professional management,” wrote Aga Malik, “facilities like these inevitably deteriorate.”
The previous approach: locked gates and £20-a-head day membership, the charity points out, were hardly generous either. The problem is that the simplest questions have not been answered.
What will it cost to play?
On Friday 7 August the WPCC put a statement on its website that said fees would be benchmarked against All Star’s own venues, including Leader’s Gardens. Five days later it posted a planning statement to the council’s public comment period over the plans that said pricing would be “aligned with borough-wide public court rates”. Those are two different yardsticks. All Star charges £12 an hour at peak for members and £16 for everyone else at its existing sites. Nobody has published what this site will charge.
How much free tennis will there be? The 7 August statement offered two hours of free after-school tennis for children. The 12 August document offered four hours of free court time a day, then added five words “when courts are not pre-booked”. For public land, run by a charity, that has always had a neighbourhood feel to it, local residents are not only unhappy about a for-profit company running things; they object to the sense that the public common they have lived next to for years is slowly losing its unique status – because of money.
The council was supposed to close comments on Friday 7 August. They are still arriving a week later.
Can you charge for tennis on a common?
This is the question that turned a planning row into something unusual.
The 1871 Act that established the WPCC exists to stop the Commons being enclosed, built on or sold. Section 35 bars the Conservators from selling, leasing or otherwise disposing of any part of them, and the only leases allowed anywhere in the Act are of a few buildings it handed over in 1871.
That is why the tennis deal is a licence rather than a lease. A licence is a contract, not a slice of property: it gives the operator permission to use the courts but no legal interest in the land, and the charity can end it. It is the approach the WPCC reached long ago and it even has a published Access Framework that says plainly that they “cannot lawfully permit a third party to use the Commons in any way which would be inconsistent” with keeping the land open for exercise and recreation, and that licences are the instrument they use instead.
The objectors noted however that the Act gives the Conservators power to improve the Commons for “unrestricted exercise and recreation”, but that a fee is a restriction. “As a profit-making business,” wrote lawyers hired by local residents, “the payment required to use All Star Tennis’ facilities would be an unlawful financial restriction.” If that is right, there is no lawful way to charge for tennis here, and there never was.
Counting against that argument is the fact that under the same Act, the Conservators can set aside parts of the Commons for particular games, naming cricket, football, golf and skating – and let them make rules about how those games are played.
Golf has run on Wimbledon Common on that basis since before the Act was passed, with club membership written into a byelaw, though the clubs pay no fee. And the charity’s own Access Framework has a whole section on charging, down to a rule that concessions be set at half price for under-17s, students, the over-60s, disabled people, the unemployed and schools. An organisation that thought charging was unlawful would not have written a pricing policy.
What nobody disputes is that the old set-up was wrong. Under the licence it granted in 2014, the WPCC’s 7 August statement says, the courts were “generally kept locked (unlawfully)” and run as a membership club with day membership “in excess of £20 per person”. Lawyers on the other side agree, writing that the pay-to-access arrangements between 2014 and 2024 “will likely have been unlawful under the Act”.
So how does the proposal to give All Star Tennis the right to run the courts for the next ten years on a commercial basis fit with what both sides seem to agree on – that you can’t charge or limit access to it? The WPCC says it is “taking specialist legal advice” and is “proceeding on the basis that the project is consistent with its statutory and fiduciary duties”. One of the people whose garden backs onto the garden – John Cameron, a former Conservator himself – is blunt: “If the old arrangement was unlawful, that does not make the new one lawful.”
All of this argument is happening through the council’s planning application process – but the truth is that the council cannot settle it. Planning permission covers tarmac, fencing and noise. It cannot hand over a power Parliament withheld, and it cannot take one away. What it can do is refuse on noise, since policy LP14 requires a noise assessment where neighbours could be harmed and while the objectors have filed one, the WPCC has not. The council could also approve the application but place on it binding conditions over hours and pricing. The question then would be whether All Star Tennis would still want the contract if it didn’t think it could make enough money from it. And without that contract, who is going to pay to get the courts resurfaced?
The legal question about what is allowed to happen on the Common goes somewhere else: to the Charity Commission, which regulates whether trustees are acting within their powers, or to the courts, which have twice been asked to rule on what the Conservators may do with this land. Or, in the end, to Parliament, which is where the City of London Corporation went when it hit the same wall on Epping Forest and Hampstead Heath, and came back in 2018 with a new Act.
The ghosts of 2014
Two decisions were taken by this charity’s board in the summer of 2014, weeks apart.
The first was the tennis licence that both sides now call unlawful.
The second was an easement: the sale to Wandsworth Council, in August 2014, of the right to build an access road across Putney Lower Common to the old Putney Hospital site, where a primary school and flats were going up. The price was £350,000. The trustees did not get the surveyor’s report charity law expects before a charity gives up an interest in its land.
That one nearly broke the organisation. Trustees fell out over whether the charity had been short-changed. The Charity Commission opened a statutory inquiry in August 2016. In May 2017 it appointed an interim manager, a solicitor brought in from outside to examine how the trustees had handled it. A valuation ordered by the regulator concluded the charity could have demanded a great deal more than £350,000 (possibly up to £1.5m), though the figures have been argued over ever since.
The inquiry closed in July 2020 and criticised the trustees, said their inability to manage the dispute was itself evidence of mismanagement. Its response was to rebuild how it takes these decisions. One of the measures was the Access Framework, published in 2020, and now the rulebook the tennis deal now sits under. Two lines of it are worth reading.
The first: where a licence is proposed over several years, “a professional valuation should normally be obtained”. The tennis arrangement is expected to run 10 to 15 years, and All Star will pay the charity what the planning statement calls a Management Fee. Whether a valuation was obtained has not been made public, and the WPCC has also refused to say how much it is.
The second is a warning the charity wrote to itself. In setting charges, it says, the longstanding rights of people who already use the Commons “should be considered with care”, because such issues “can often be overlooked and can be deep-seated, with the introduction of charges creating tensions that can quickly escalate and could cause reputational damage to the charity if not properly handled”.
That was written in 2020. Six years later, it seems prescient as 84 people (and rising) have not only objected to the tennis courts plans but hired lawyers and commissioned noise reports.
The other 2014 decision is coming back too. The easement ties the access road to the site being used as a school providing free education, and the school closes this summer. Whatever the building becomes next will need the Conservators’ agreement, negotiated this time at proper value with independent advice. The council has been discussing its future since November 2025, which only came out after six months of private talks surfaced under freedom of information.
Why the charity keeps reaching
None of this is greed. It is arithmetic.
The Conservators are funded by a levy on local households, and what they can charge has been capped by regulations since 1990. Reform is stuck until 2028 and the gap keeps growing. The charity is rewriting its 150-year-old rulebook, but on the levy and on parking, not on its power to license land.
Its own planning statement says the quiet part out loud. Realistic court and coaching charges, it concludes, will deliver community benefit “without reliance on local levy subsidy”.
The WPCC is caught in its own trap: it cannot raise money the way the statute intends, because the statute is frozen. So it reaches for commercial solutions on land that may not allow it. It made two decisions in that direction in 2014 and a decade later, both are coming back to haunt it.
Meanwhile a third summer is going. The tarmac is as cracked as it was when this started, and the courts are still out of action.
Reading the files yourself
Every document quoted here is public.
The planning file. Application 2025/4618 is on Wandsworth’s planning register, with the 12 August planning statement, both Buxton letters, the chairman’s letter and all 223 comments. Case officer: Laura Nieves.
The charity’s own rules. The 7 August statement is on the WPCC tennis page, and the Access Framework sets out how it says it may license land and set charges.
The statutory question. Whether a charity is acting within its powers is for the Charity Commission, not the council. Concerns can be raised at gov.uk/complain-about-charity, and the Conservators’ accounts and trustees are on the charity register.
Even with this explainer I am struggling to understand all the issues. But I can’t help thinking that there must be a better way to re-open the tennis courts without unduly inconveniencing the immediate neighbours without a legal battle and intervention of Parliament. I hope they can find a way through these difficulties. Seems a shame to leave the courts empty and deteriorating for a further 2 years at least – and likely many more.