The All England Lawn Tennis Club won yesterday’s High Court ruling by a wider margin than almost anyone expected. But Save Wimbledon Park’s response, issued within hours, reveals a fight that now has more fronts than a single court case, and one of those fronts moves to the House of Lords within weeks.
Yesterday’s judgment resolved one question. At least three significant obstacles to the development remain. And the legal picture is more complicated than either side’s public statement suggested.
What the judgment actually decided
The case turned on a single legal argument: that 1960s local government reorganisation legislation had the effect of imposing a statutory public recreation trust on the golf course land under the Public Health Act 1875. Had that argument succeeded, development would have been a legal impossibility regardless of any planning permission. The AELTC itself conceded this: it acknowledged that if the trust existed, its entire expansion plan could not proceed.
Mr Justice Thompsell rejected the argument on three separate and independent grounds, each sufficient on its own. The golf course had been operated as a private club throughout its history. The public had never been admitted. No public recreation trust had ever come into being. And when the AELTC purchased the freehold from Merton in 1993, there were no public rights in existence to bind it.
The judge illustrated the problem with Save Wimbledon Park’s reading of the law with a striking example. If their interpretation were correct, a Battersea housing estate built on land originally acquired for open space would also have been impressed with a public recreation trust. That, he found, would produce “absurd and unworkable” results.
Save Wimbledon Park had relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Day v Shropshire, which established that very clear words are needed to extinguish public recreation rights. Thompsell distinguished it: in Day, the land had actually been used for public recreation. Wimbledon Park golf course never had been.
Why SWP is not done
Save Wimbledon Park will apply to the Court of Appeal for permission to appeal the judgment. The group’s director Jeremy Hudson said: “We love tennis but we continue the fight after this news because there is a strong case for protecting this precious open space from development. Wimbledon promised they would never build on this land.”
That promise is worth pausing on. When the AELTC bought the golf course land from Merton in 1993, it signed a covenant, a private binding legal obligation, promising not to develop it. That covenant sits entirely outside the statutory trust question and entirely outside the courts’ ruling yesterday. The AELTC has conceded that its proposed development would breach the covenant, and that it would need a further court application to have it removed. Merton Council, which holds the covenant, did not participate in yesterday’s case. It retains a separate legal lever over the development’s future, independent of the courts.
The planning challenge is the bigger remaining obstacle. In November 2025, Save Wimbledon Park was granted permission to challenge the planning consent in a separate Court of Appeal case. That challenge asks whether planning permission for the development was lawfully granted, an entirely different legal question from yesterday’s statutory trust issue. If it succeeds, the planning consent falls and the development cannot proceed regardless of yesterday’s ruling. No hearing date has been confirmed publicly.
On the prospects of the statutory trust appeal, one lawyer with knowledge of the case urged caution about writing it off. Thompsell found against Save Wimbledon Park on three independent grounds and described the AELTC’s case as having “considerable, one might even say irresistible, force.” That is a high bar to overturn. But the legal questions involved are of national importance, and the Court of Appeal may take a different view.
The Lords amendment: a separate front entirely
SWP director Christopher Coombe flagged a development that is moving on a track entirely separate from the courts, and on a faster timeline.
An amendment to the English Devolution Bill, tabled by Lord Banner, is due to be debated in the House of Lords within the next four to five weeks. It would create a mechanism allowing developers to apply to the Secretary of State for an order discharging a statutory trust over land, extinguishing public recreation rights through an administrative process rather than litigation.
This is not a new proposal. A previous Lords amendment targeting the same legal issue was abandoned in November 2025 after peers condemned it. A second attempt followed, and when it came before a Lords Grand Committee on 5 March, ministers who had opposed the amendment in November reversed their position and backed it. Lord Banner withdrew it at committee stage (standard practice before a full vote) and said he would return it at Report stage.
Yesterday’s ruling changes the amendment’s significance considerably. If the Court of Appeal grants Save Wimbledon Park permission to appeal the statutory trust judgment, and if that appeal has any prospect of success, the amendment becomes relevant again as a legislative safety net for the AELTC. Coombe argued it also matters nationally: “This judgment is bad news for everyone in London and all around the country who live near similarly protected green space and open land.”
The honest picture
Yesterday’s ruling was a significant win for the AELTC. The statutory trust argument was the strongest legal weapon available to its opponents. It has been rejected comprehensively.
But the AELTC’s chair Deborah Jevans’s statement that the club would “now move forward” reflects the significance of yesterday’s victory more than the full state of play. The planning consent challenge in the Court of Appeal remains live and is entirely unaffected by yesterday’s judgment. Merton’s covenants remain unresolved. Save Wimbledon Park will seek permission to appeal yesterday’s ruling. A Lords amendment that could change the underlying law is weeks away from a vote.
One major obstacle has been removed. Several remain.
Putney.news has covered this story extensively. Yesterday’s judgment, including the full AELTC and Save Wimbledon Park responses, is here. We explained the five key legal questions at stake in January, and on Tuesday we set out why the next six weeks would be decisive.
