Wimbledon tournament expansion reaches Court of Appeal

Controversial plans to expand the Wimbledon tennis tournament onto protected green land will be heard at the Court of Appeal next month.

The All England Club’s plan to build an 8,000-seat stadium and 38 new courts on the old Wimbledon Park golf course will be heard on 7 October. Save Wimbledon Park, the campaign group fighting the development, had asked for it to be put off. It wanted a second case decided first, over whether the land is legally protected for the public. The request was denied.

Effectively, the courts will now decide whether the new complex can be built before deciding whether the club has the right to build it.

The campaigners say the delay was opposed by both the club and the Mayor of London. The application went to two councils, because the land sits across a boundary: Merton voted to approve it, Wandsworth voted to refuse. That split sent the decision up to City Hall, where the Deputy Mayor granted permission in November 2024.

That permission given by the Mayor is what next month’s hearing is about. The campaigners tried to overturn it in the High Court and lost in July last year, before Mr Justice Saini. Their appeal is listed as a float, which means it has a date but no fixed slot and could slip, with four and a half hours set aside.

The second case asks whether the land is held under a legal duty to keep it open for the public. If it is, the campaigners say, nothing can be built there at all, whatever happens next month. The Court of Appeal agreed in July to hear it, saying their arguments had “sufficient substance for the appeal to have a real prospect of success” – routine wording is such cases. The records say it must be heard by 15 July 2027, and no date has been given yet.

What the club has and has not accepted

The plans face three legal obstacles. The first is the planning permission itself. The second is whether the land is legally protected for the public. The third is a set of promises the club made when it bought the land.

Those promises date from 1993, when Merton Council sold it the golf course. The club agreed the land would be used only for leisure, recreation or open space. It agreed that nothing would be built on it beyond buildings serving that use, and nothing that spoiled how open the place feels.

In its briefing, the campaign says the club “has conceded in court that its project fails two of these three legal impediments”. It says the club has admitted the development would break the 1993 promises, and would need a court to lift them.

The judgments bear out part of that. Mr Justice Saini recorded that one point was not in dispute: the land carries promises requiring it to be kept open and free of building. Mr Justice Thompsell, ruling in March, recorded that the scheme cannot go ahead until those promises are dealt with. We reported in July that the club accepts its plans would break them.

What the club disputes is that this stops it. Both judgments record its position that the promises can be lifted, and that legal routes exist for doing so.

On the second obstacle it has admitted nothing. The club has always accepted that if the land does carry a duty to the public, it cannot build. But it argued in March that no such duty had ever existed, and it won. Mr Justice Thompsell found that Wimbledon Park itself had been opened to the public but the golf course never had. It was leased out on terms incompatible with public use, he held, and fenced to keep people off. Land “that had never been appropriated or designated for the purposes of public enjoyment”, he concluded, could be sold without a public trust attaching to it. That is the ruling the campaigners are appealing next summer.

There is also another legal process that may route around some of the obstacles. In April, Parliament gave ministers the power to release land from exactly the kind of public trust the campaigners are arguing for. Section 69 of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act became law on 29 April. It lets an owner apply for a “statutory trust discharge order” where the council that sold the land did not follow the advertising procedure at the time. The Act says it does not matter whether that procedure had to be followed.

The club owns the freehold. Whether the 1993 sale was properly advertised is one of the questions the courts have been asked. The power cannot be used yet, because it needs regulations setting out how to apply and none have been made. The peer who moved the amendment, Lord Banner – a long-term director at AELTC – told the Lords it was “in fact academic” for Wimbledon Park.

The hearing sits in open court at the Royal Courts of Justice on Wednesday 7 October. Anyone can attend. There is no consultation to answer and no objection to file: at this stage the only thing a resident can do is watch.