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<\/p>\nThree Court of Appeal judges will decide whether the Mayor of London was right to approve a tennis tournament expansion onto Wimbledon Park while knowing the law might forbid it because of legal protections on the land itself. They reserved judgment on Thursday after two days of argument, and set no date for a ruling.<\/p>\n
The expansion belongs to the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), the private members\u2019 club that runs the famous Wimbledon tournament. City Hall\u2019s officers assessed its proposal as if the land were held on a public trust, a duty to keep it open to the public, then recommended approval anyway. Save Wimbledon Park, the campaign group appealing, says that made the decision irrational.<\/p>\n
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The permission covers an 8,000-seat show court and 38 grass tennis courts on the former golf course across Church Road from the Championships. The land is Metropolitan Open Land, protected like Green Belt, and part of a registered park landscaped by the famed landscape designer Capability Brown. Its Grade II* rating is the second-highest of the three grades on the national register.<\/p>\n
Wandsworth councillors voted 7-0 to refuse the scheme and Merton Council approved it, so the decision passed to City Hall. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, stepped aside because he had publicly backed the plans in 2021, and his deputy, Jules Pipe, approved them at a hearing in September 2024. Permission was formally granted on 18 November.<\/p>\n
Lady Justice King, presiding alongside Lord Justice Holgate and Lord Justice Dingemans, said she hoped the judges \u201cwon\u2019t be too long\u201d in producing their ruling. It is the first of the three legal questions<\/a> over the scheme to be decided.<\/p>\n So why would anyone approve something they assume the law may forbid?<\/p>\n AELTC and City Hall say this is how planning works. In their argument, a permission decides only whether a use of land is acceptable. Who owns the land, what promises bind it and what other laws apply are, they say, questions for other courts, other processes and sometimes Parliament.<\/p>\n Russell Harris KC, AELTC\u2019s barrister, made the point at the expense of Sasha White KC, the campaigners\u2019 barrister, whom he described as a big Arsenal fan. Mr Harris said that if he applied to knock down Mr White\u2019s house and put up a memorial to Spurs, the council would still have to judge the plan on its planning merits. It would not have to decide whether Mr White would allow it. <\/p>\n AELTC accepts its scheme could not go ahead on land held on a public trust. It does not accept that a trust, if one exists, would stop it for good.<\/p>\n AELTC\u2019s barrister listed three ways round one. Parliament can pass an Act, as it did in January for the national Holocaust Memorial, whose planning permission a court had quashed because of a 1900 law. A council can use its powers to acquire land and clear it of such trusts. Or the land can be handed back to Merton, which could advertise the trust\u2019s discharge. If a development is in the public interest, he said, \u201cin a parliamentary democracy there will be a way around it.\u201d<\/p>\n Peers have debated changing the law with the Wimbledon Park scheme as their example. The debates included Lord O\u2019Donnell, the former Cabinet Secretary, who sits on AELTC\u2019s committee and was a director of three of its companies when the first amendment was tabled.<\/p>\n AELTC\u2019s barrister mentioned the power ministers gained this year to discharge trusts of this kind, added to the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act<\/a> through an amendment by Conservative peer Lord Banner. The power cannot yet be used because the rules for applying have not been made. \u201cI don\u2019t rely on it because I don\u2019t need to,\u201d AELTC\u2019s barrister said. The Mayor\u2019s barrister mentioned the power too, noting it was not law when the decision was made.<\/p>\n The Mayor\u2019s barrister told the judges that irrationality is a difficult argument to win, and an even harder one when a High Court judge has already found the decision rational<\/a>. Officers accepted AELTC needed to expand, he said, but deliberately dropped AELTC\u2019s own word for that need: \u201cpressing\u201d. The tennis club had not said it needed the courts by any particular date, he argued.<\/p>\n \u2018An illusion\u2019<\/p>\n The campaigners\u2019 barrister told the court the approach was \u201can illusion\u201d. Officers said they had assumed the trust existed, he said, but in every balance they struck they also assumed the scheme would be built. Their summary table gives every benefit the same weight whether the land is held on trust or not.<\/p>\n \u201cHow can you say you\u2019re taking into account something which everyone agrees cannot happen?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n City Hall had asked a barrister, Timothy Morshead KC, whether the public has rights over the golf course. Two days before the officers\u2019 report, he advised that on the law as it stands the answer was yes: the owner \u201cmust make the land available to the public on a free and unrestricted basis\u201d. Asking at all, the campaigners\u2019 barrister said, showed officers thought the answer mattered.<\/p>\n Mr Morshead hedged. His advice rested on a 2023 Supreme Court ruling he had doubts about. \u201cBarristers advise: only the Court decides,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n There was no sign anyone asked Mr Morshead what that would mean for the scheme, the campaigners\u2019 barrister said. And none of the three ways round a trust that AELTC now describes was put to the Deputy Mayor when he decided.<\/p>\n Lord Justice Holgate, who gave the campaigners permission to appeal in November 2025, put their case in one line: officers had \u201csevered the existence of the trust from its enforcement\u201d. He asked whether officers had referred to the permanence of a trust. \u201cNot expressly, no,\u201d the Mayor\u2019s barrister replied.<\/p>\n But Lord Justice Holgate observed that in most planning cases, the merits do not turn on whether a scheme can be delivered. And Lord Justice Dingemans put to Save Wimbledon Park\u2019s barrister a High Court judge\u2019s point from an earlier case: if the trust stops the scheme, nothing is built, so there is no harm either.<\/p>\n What is on the land<\/p>\n The registered park once covered about 480 hectares around its lake. In the 1870s much of it was sold for housing, until the Borough of Wimbledon bought the northern part, including the lake, in 1914 and opened it to the public. About 60 hectares survive, roughly an eighth, according to the government\u2019s heritage body, Historic England. The golf course is about half of what is left.<\/p>\n The site holds 1,112 trees. AELTC\u2019s plans keep all 41 ancient and veteran trees, mostly oaks, which national planning policy treats as irreplaceable. Around 300 trees would be felled, four in five of them to make way for the tennis courts, buildings and paths. AELTC\u2019s own tree assessment says the other 61 would go to restore the park\u2019s historic landscape. Every tree on the golf course is protected by a tree preservation order or conservation area status. Officers counted the removal of \u201cinappropriate\u201d golf-related planting as a heritage gain.<\/p>\n The 1,500 replacement trees are not like for like. A thousand would be at least two years old; the other 500 would have trunks 12 to 16cm round. City Hall\u2019s officers called the tree loss \u201cregrettable\u201d, and a planning condition requires the value of the lost trees to be at least replaced. Forest Research, the government\u2019s forestry research agency, says the carbon a stand of trees takes up starts slowly and builds as the canopy grows. A new woodland of young trees holds very little carbon beside a stand of large ones, it says.<\/p>\n Critics dispute AELTC\u2019s claim that the park would gain nature. Dr David Dawson, a former joint head of the Mayor of London\u2019s environment group, calculates the scheme would cut<\/a> the site\u2019s wildlife value by 36%, against AELTC\u2019s claimed 23% gain.<\/p>\n AELTC says the scheme would open 27 acres of new public parkland. The legal agreement attached to the permission, signed on 15 November 2024, requires that land to be kept open \u201cin perpetuity\u201d. But access is on a \u201cpermissive basis\u201d, meaning by the owner\u2019s permission rather than as a legal right. The northern parkland can be closed for up to 10 weeks around AELTC\u2019s tournaments, longer if the councils agree.<\/p>\n
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The three justices deciding the case<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/swp-court-of-appeal-1024x575.jpg\")
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