Centre court and clubhouse, best known as venue for the Queen’s Club Championship.
The Queen’s Club is a grassy green enclave almost hidden at the end of a residential street in red-bricked West Kensington. Dating from 1886, it claims to be the first multi-purpose sports complex to be built anywhere in the world. Today it is exclusively home to the racquet sports: tennis, squash and rackets, but over time it has hosted more than twenty major sports, including football, cricket and rugby. It tapped into the late-Victorian flowering of competitive sport and was once the home ground of Corinthian F.C., the princes of amateur football.
Lawn tennis is the sport most closely associated with the Queen’s Club. The Lawn Tennis Association, the governing body of British tennis, owned the Queen’s Club between 1953 and 2007. Looming fears that redevelopment of the site would greatly exceed its value as a sports club led to it being sold to its members. This protected the future of the Queen’s Club Championships, the annual men’s tournament held on grass since 1890, which is a precursor to Wimbledon and the unofficial warm-up for top players. The twelve grass courts at Queen’s are rated as the best anywhere, possibly superior to those at Wimbledon itself.
Two rare sports played at Queens are rackets and real tennis, both games being played in substantial enclosed courts.
Rackets started in the eighteenth century, when it was played by the gentlemen inmates of two of London’s debtors’ prisons: King’s Bench in Southwark and Fleet in Clerkenwell, and it exploited the prisons’ most essential features: the walls. The strangely skewed rules of such institutions permitted certain privileges, and there were four courts at King’s Bench. Well-bred prisoners had spiced up the handball game fives by using tennis racquets. The game migrated to public schools, with Harrow being the first to gain a court. Queen’s rackets courts date from 1880, by which time the code of the game had been established, based on a four-wall 30 60 ft (9 18 m) enclosed court, with a ceiling no less than 30 ft (9 m) high.
The wooden racquet is called a bat, and is used to hit a hard white ball that can travel at up to 180 mph. Some elements of the sport resemble squash, which began as an off-shoot of rackets, although the scoring system differs and the rules of the two sports have diverged substantially.
An honours board for public school rackets competitions. Harrow School was the first to adopt the game.
Queen’s is also the national headquarters of real tennis, hosting the British Open every year. Real tennis is a precursor of lawn tennis, and its supporters claim that it has the oldest continuous annual world championship in sport, at over 250 years. A measure of the game’s rarity is there are only forty-seven courts in the world, and two of those are at Queen’s. The sport is known as jeu de paume in France (originally being played with the hand rather than with a racquet), ‘court tennis’ in the United States and ‘royal tennis’ in Australia.
Real tennis court from the dedans.
Its heyday was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, being played by members of the royalty in France and England. It became known as real tennis after the derived game of lawn tennis became the more widely known sport. Though similar in certain respects, with the same scoring system, two bounces of the ball does not bring necessarily bring the point to an end. Real tennis is claimed to be a more complex and technical sport, and the court is wider and longer than that for lawn tennis, enclosed by four walls – three of which have sloping roofs, known as penthouses – and a ceiling lofty enough to contain all but the highest lobs. There is also a buttress called a tambour, which intrudes into the playing area, and off which shots may be played. Points can be won by hitting the ball into certain spaces below the penthouses. The hand-made real tennis balls are heavier than those for lawn tennis, and ground strokes are favoured, which may be the reason that the wooden racquets for this sport are asymmetrical.
The real tennis racquet is asymmetrical, and the hand-made balls are heavy.
In 1908 Queen’s Club hosted three events during the first London Olympics Games: rackets, covered court tennis (indoor tennis) and real tennis. This combination was not deemed successful for future Olympics.
For thirty years, the annual Oxford and Cambridge University rugby and football matches and athletics challenges took place at the Club, sometimes drawing as many as 10,000 spectators. As these events outgrew the Club’s facilities, they found new homes at Twickenham, Wembley and White City. The increasingly popular game of lawn tennis took over the grounds of the Club, and there are twelve grass courts today.