Before the first ball was even served, protesters were already queuing in Wimbledon Park on day one of the championship, not for tickets, but to tell the All England Club: we’re still here, and you’re still not listening.

It’s not even 6:30 in the morning on the last Monday of June 2026, but Wimbledon Park is already bustling with people. There is a constant flow from the entrance on Wimbledon Park Road, near Southfields station, the location of what tennis fans know as The Queue, where you join the end of the line and receive a numbered Queue card that shows your place. This is the Club’s system for allocating on-the-day tickets. That card is needed to buy tickets, but it does not guarantee entry, since admission still depends on daily capacity in the Grounds.

Some spectators would argue that it’s part of the tradition of the event: waiting, camping overnight to be early enough, and queuing are treated almost like a ritual. Others would think this is evidence of poor organisation, unseen at other Grand Slam tournaments (the idea of hundreds of people camping on the Boulevard d’Auteuil in Paris is indeed laughable).

But taking over most of the park for their “organised queue” each summer is not enough for the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC). They also want to expand into an area equivalent to roughly half the park’s current size (including the former golf club), with a controversial £200 million plan, which would see a new 8,000-seat show court, 38 new grass courts, and a host of associated facilities built across the former golf course site in SW19.

This year, the campaigners of the Save Wimbledon Park campaign (SWP) decided to join the tennis fans (many of them actually long-time supporters of the tennis event) and came in force on the first day of the Championships to demonstrate their frustration at not being listened to by the Tennis Club.

SWP is a local community group opposing the current expansion plans for Wimbledon Park, particularly the permanent new stadium proposed on protected parkland covered by a conservation covenant. The group has been campaigning for five years, arguing that the AELTC has never genuinely engaged with the community, saying these “consultations” amount to little more than the AELTC presenting its own plan rather than listening to alternatives or considering feedback.

This frustration was symbolised by protesters wearing giant ears at the demonstration, a visual message that the AELTC isn’t listening to the people it claims to have consulted. Simon Wright, a local resident and SWP campaigner, commented:

“We got about 60 or 70 people out, which for 6:30 on a Monday morning, is not bad.”

Susan Cusack, SWP spokesperson and a member of the Wimbledon Union of Residents Association, said:

“Unofficially, in previous years, a lot of the local people have actually protested on the first morning at the queue, and we decided — because we really have just not been listened to — that we would make it a little bit more official, and make sure that they know they’re not listening to us.

After all the consultations, the only minor change was a dedicated 4 acres added at the northern end of the golf course, for the public. And it’s mostly hard standing, and it won’t be available from May to August. So it was a minor, minor, minor change, and that’s really the only concession that we’ve ever had.

So they are just not listening, and that’s the real message today. They need to start listening to the locals. If they had listened at the very, very beginning, and they had consulted at the very beginning, they wouldn’t be in this position five years down the line.”

“I think what was really like the nail in the coffin was when, in response to us trying to suggest an alternative plan, the All England Club just sent us back what they had responded in 2021. So, we know that they haven’t been listening to us for five years. They just simply put out the same old mantra,” she added.

Gesturing at the crowds queuing around her, she explained that the Tennis Club was already encroaching on most of the public park. She pointed out that the queue itself now starts earlier than in previous years — where once it built up gradually from Sunday afternoon, this year it was already forming in the early hours of Saturday morning, well before any official facilities were in place for those arriving. As she put it, the park is being taken over purely to serve the tournament’s needs:

“This is the public park for the people of Merton. This is Wimbledon public park, and our local space is being taken over. Here is the Great Field. All the kids who normally play football here, who have their activities here, can’t do anything now. Look at the extent of it. The entire space has been taken over.”

Despite the scale of the proposed expansion, the AELTC has given no indication that ticketing organisation will change. As Cusack put it, the Queue itself would remain unchanged:

“This would still be here, even if they’ve got all of their plans, and they built everything they want. So, this is why they’re chanting at the moment ‘green, not greed’, because this is just [it]: the more people they get in, the more money they make, the more uncomfortable it is for all of the spectators.”

At the end of April, SWP organised a presentation of an alternative plan. One of the objectives of that alternative plan was to address the congestion on the current site.

“If you think about football — football starts at a certain time, and you might have 30 minutes extra, but it finishes at a certain time. It’s one entrance, one exit. Tennis is different. You’ve got lots of different courts and stadiums, all emptying out at different times. So, you have to manage that congestion, and for a whole day. There’s congestion here, there’s congestion over there, there’s just congestion everywhere. So that makes a very, very big difference about what you’re managing.

And so if you can try and reduce that congestion, which the alternative plan did, we’re doing something positive. This is one alternative plan — there’s probably lots — this alternative plan is, you know, trying to help them. Not trying to hinder, but trying to help,” she added.

An Alternative Plan

And that scheme is not designed on the corner of a kitchen table: it was developed independently by Richard Rees, the same tennis “master planner” who worked on Wimbledon’s 1990s redevelopment and was responsible, with the team from Building Design Partnership, for Henman Hill and the new Number One Court, and who shaped what is still nowadays referred to as “Tennis in an English Garden.” He has also worked on major Olympic tennis venues, including Sydney, Athens, Beijing, and Rio.

Rees’s opinion on the AELTC proposal is not kind, to say the least.

“I’ve looked at the plan that has been produced by the All England Club and has got planning permission for the development of Wimbledon Park, and I am not impressed, for two reasons.

The first reason is that there are far too many courts, in my view, and they are unnecessary in terms of the functioning of the club and the tournament. The second is the new Number Two Court — something the size of the Albert Hall — being built in an area of the park which has a covenant on it and is in a listed park.

This, I do not think, is necessary, because all of the Grand Slams have similar amounts of seats for the top three courts — that is, the Centre Court, the Number One Court, and the Number Two Court — and these are actually on a par. So there’s no need for Wimbledon to overdo the number of seats. I can understand why they might want a roof over those particular courts, but not necessarily to grow them to that size,” he said in a video explaining his alternative plan.

Indeed, Wimbledon is already in the same capacity band as the other Grand Slams on its main show courts. The big outlier is New York’s Arthur Ashe Stadium, with 50% more capacity than the others, while Melbourne, Paris, and London are all in a fairly tight range for their top courts. In addition, Roland Garros has already expanded and modernised quite significantly in recent years, on a much more land-constrained urban site in Paris than the others, so its ability to expand again is very limited (18 clay courts and 11 hectares after extension, while Wimbledon Tennis Club is already 17.3 hectares).

His alternative plan for Wimbledon was developed with local architect Ken McFarlane and presented by campaigners as a less harmful way to meet the Club’s needs while preserving more of the parkland. The broad idea was to improve the existing Wimbledon site and reduce pressure on the park-side expansion, rather than building the larger new complex proposed by the AELTC.

The AELTC says it needs more capacity to secure the Championships’ long-term future, which is why it wants the larger new show-court complex and more practice/competition courts. When defending the case in September 2024 at City Hall, AELTC chief executive Sally Bolton claimed that 39 courts, including the show court, were the “minimum that we could work with“.

• Read: City Hall approves the controversial Wimbledon Tennis Club expansion, but legal challenges loom

Rees’s proposal takes the opposite view: that Wimbledon can solve its capacity and operational problems more efficiently by upgrading and reusing the existing footprint, without the necessity to build an 8000-seat additional show court on protected parkland. In his proposal, a new show court would host 5000 seats, which is similar to the new Australian Open Kia Arena show court.

“I do think there are a lot of opportunities for a better plan, and there are reasons for that. The first reason is the number of courts is too much — I’ve just mentioned that. They originally were proposing only 18 courts, and that is all you need to transfer the qualifying tournament onto the site, which I think is really critical — they do need to do that — but it’s grown to 38, and that’s not necessary.

Our proposal is for 21 new courts. This allows for three courts to be transferred from the existing site into the park, in order to decongest the existing site, which is getting very, very fraught in terms of numbers of people.”

Rees’s argument is that the operational pressure at Wimbledon is mainly a problem of layout, circulation, and under-used space, not simply a shortage of land. In other words, he thinks the existing grounds can be made to work harder by reorganising them more intelligently rather than by adding a much larger new complex. The pressure Rees is trying to address is the need for more capacity and smoother operations during the Championships. His answer is not “build as much as possible,” but rather “replan the estate so the current one functions better”.

In practical terms, Rees argued that Wimbledon’s issues should be solved by making better use of the current grounds, because he believed the club had underestimated the crowding and operational pressure that a much larger expansion would create.

“Another element which will also decongest the existing site is to create two destinations to the east, next to the lake, which are equivalents to Henman Hill — or “the Hill,” as it’s now called.

The first is the Scene on the Lake, a big space overlooking the lake on the north side. The second is the Marlborough Brook site, which is similar but slightly smaller.

That will give the possibility of pulling the public away from the main site — at the moment, there’s nothing to make them want to go into the east of the site. So the congestion will still build up, with an extra 8,000 people on the site itself.”

The alternative is therefore not just a different layout, but a different planning philosophy: smaller scale, less environmental harm, and more sympathetic to Wimbledon’s park setting.

Rees does not oppose expansion in principle; he opposes expansion at the scale and intensity of the current AELTC scheme. He invited the AELTC to engage with the alternative plan and concluded:

“We think it’s an opportunity to enhance tennis in an English garden, which I think they are somewhat ignoring at the moment, in the bid to get big and grand. Wimbledon will always be the premier Grand Slam, whatever happens, and there’s no need for them to develop to this scale. We think it’s actually a good idea to scale it down and make it better for everybody.”

Susan Cusack insisted that this plan represented only one alternative, and must be considered as a suggestion. Unfortunately, although the AELTC attended the first of the two presentations for the first time (and their chair, Debbie Jevans, was among them), there is currently zero progress apparently.

“It’s not saying that’s the end result. All developers — as I’m sure the All England Club have — have alternative plans themselves, although they have told us there is no Plan B. They only want everything that they want. They rejected our plan. And they just sent us back their response from 2021. So any consultations, any discussions with what they call ‘the local community’ when they have people in the park here, is not a real consultation. Obviously, they don’t care about it.”

When asked about the attempt from Paul Kohler, the MP for Wimbledon, to organise a mediation between the AELTC and SWP, her response was not optimistic:

“It hasn’t got anywhere. They just don’t listen, which is what our message — one of our messages today is: they just don’t listen.”

In a previous message sent to CJI last year, the AELTC claimed to have spoken to more than 10,000 people as part of its consultation and information events, including more than 100 guided tours of the proposed southern parkland, various open days, “meet the expert” events, and residents’ groups.

Legal cases still going on

Last year, SWP brought a judicial review challenging the Mayor of London’s decision to grant planning permission for the AELTC’s expansion — and lost. That fight alone cost close to £200,000, funded entirely through community fundraising, but SWP was granted the right to appeal, and that planning appeal is still pending at the Court of Appeal (permission was granted by Lord Justice Holgate last November, who found the claim had “a real prospect of success”).

• Read: High Court rejects challenge to Wimbledon expansion, but legal battle continues with Trust and Appeal cases

The second major legal front was the statutory trust case, which asked whether the former golf course land was protected by a public recreation trust dating back to a 1960s local government reorganisation. SWP acted as the representative defendant, with its costs covered by the AELTC. This past April, Mr Justice Thompsell ruled comprehensively against SWP, finding on three separate grounds that no such trust had ever existed — essentially because the golf course had always been run as a private club and never opened to the public, so nothing was ever “dedicated” to public use in the first place. This removed what had been seen as the single biggest legal obstacle to the AELTC’s £200m scheme.

• Read: Wimbledon Park Trust case: Judge rules in favour of the Tennis Club but fight continues

SWP immediately said it would seek permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal, with a decision on that expected within roughly three months — but unlike the trust case itself, SWP will have to fund this appeal itself.

Currently, three battles remain live: the planning appeal, the bid for permission to appeal the trust ruling, and the dispute over the 1993 restrictive covenants.

The covenants — under which the AELTC agreed not to develop the golf course, to keep it open, and to provide a public lakeside walkway — were explicitly left untouched by the trust ruling. The AELTC has already admitted its plans would breach these covenants and would need a separate court application to remove them if Merton chooses to enforce them; Merton’s Labour administration has so far declined to say publicly whether it will.

Christopher Coombe, director of SWP, said:

“We’ve written to Merton to ask why they are not enforcing the covenants. We’re going to — you’ll get it when we issue an announcement about that. But the All England admitted in court that they will break the covenant if they go ahead with this project. So we’ve said to them there’s a way of doing it without breaking the covenant, and here’s a good solution which you ought to look at. And they just dismissed us and said, don’t worry.”

Simon Wright explained:

“We’re honestly not sure when Merton are going to consider the covenants. They have to consider them. There’s no way they can ignore them. They’re legally binding. So, we are waiting to hear from the new administration of Merton on what happens next.”

The second of the three ongoing battles is the planning appeal at the Court of Appeal, which remains active, though its significance is now somewhat entangled with the trust outcome that SWP is contesting. Christopher Coombe commented: “Our barrister says we have strong grounds for pursuing it.”

And third, SWP is currently seeking permission to appeal Mr Justice Thompsell’s ruling.

However, Wright is cautious about the cost involved. Referring to both the planning and trust appeals, he said:

“We’ve made two appeals. We’re waiting to hear for the second one, but the first one has been accepted [this hearing should happen this October — note of the editor]. We are being very careful about considering our options, because all court actions are extremely expensive. So, we’re going to have to spend our money wisely.”

• Read: Wimbledon: In a David vs Goliath battle, what is the price for democracy?

So, nearly five years in, SWP has lost the judicial review but secured the right to appeal, lost the trust case at first instance (with an appeal bid pending), and still faces an unresolved dispute over the covenants with Merton. The tennis club may have won the opening exchanges, but the campaign continues on multiple fronts.