If you think of tennis in England, there is a very good chance that you will think of London. The fact that Wimbledon is one of the sport’s biggest tournaments certainly helps with that feeling, not least of all because it is one that players have to prepare for. Wimbledon is the only one of the major championships in the sport that is played on grass, which means that players need to get into the rhythm of playing on what is a quietly unusual surface for many of them. This means that other tournaments are played on grass in the build-up to the Grand Slam event, offering an opportunity for players to see where their preparation is.
It would be fair to say, then, that Wimbledon is the centre of the tennis universe in Great Britain and in London especially. Everything revolves around the Grand Slam event, which is why there aren’t as many tournaments in the capital as there might be in other sports. Once the grass season is over and players move on to play on the likes of clay or hard court surfaces, there is less of a requirement for grass tournaments to be on offer. Nevertheless, the period of the year when it is the surface du jour means that there is a need for the tournaments on offer to be tip-top, with the eyes of the tennis world fixed on London.
Wimbledon
The Championships, which is more commonly known as Wimbledon on account of where it is held, is the oldest tennis tournament anywhere in the world. It is considered by many to be the most prestigious in part because it is the only one that is still played on grass. It typically tends to be played in late June and early July, with the Ladies’ Singles Final taking place on a Saturday and the Gentlemen’s Singles Final being played on the Sunday at the end of a fortnight of tennis. The All England Croquet Club was founded on the 23rd of July 1868, with lawn tennis added to the activities played there in 1876 as an adaptation of ‘real tennis’.
This resulted in the club changing its name to become the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in the spring of 1877, such was the popularity of the new sport. The first Wimbledon Championships began on the ninth of July 1877, with 22 men paying a guinea each in order to enter. The winner, Spencer Gore, was presented with a silver challenge cup that was valued at a worth of 25 guineas, as well as 12 guineas in prize money. The courts were arranged around the principle court, which resulted in it being called Centre Court. At the time, the club was based on Nursery Road off Worple Road, moving to its present location in 1922.
In spite of the move, Centre Court remained the name of the principle court at the club. There were four courts added in 1980 and a new No. 1 Court opened in 1997. There have been numerous changes and developments over the years, including the addition of a retractible roof to Centre Court. Though there was only a men’s competition initially, a new women’s competition was added in 1884 and the likes of Gentlemen’s Doubles, Ladies’ Doubles and Mixed Doubles have been added to the roster since. Nowadays, the fortnight of Wimbledon consists of five main events, four junior events and seven invitational events.
The Queen’s Club Championship
Established in 1881 as the London Athletic Club Open Tournament, the competition was originally played at Stamford Bridge in Fulham. Also known as the London Athletic Club Tournament, it was given the moniker of the Championship of London in 1885, cementing its place as one of the sport’s most important competitions that was played in the capital. It moved to its currently location in 1890, with Queen’s Club hosting Singles events for both men and women. A men’s doubles event was added 13 years later, then in 1905 a mixed doubles event was added to the programme. The women’s doubles were added in 1915.
The First World War and the Second World War interrupted the tournament, then in 1970 it was played as part of the Grand Prix tennis circuit. In 1973, a decision was taken to remove the women’s tournament from Queen’s, then a year later the men’s tournament also stopped for a few years. It was known as the London Grass Court Championship during this period, with the competition only becoming the Queens Club Championship in 1977. The competition tends to take place in June, starting one week after the conclusion of the French Open, which is played on a clay court, and is designed to finish a week before the start of Wimbledon.
The Surbiton Trophy
Whilst the Queen’s Club Championship is the number one tournament for male players looking to get into the right frame of mind ahead of the grass major played at Wimbledon, female players have a number of options in front of them. Arguably the main one is the Eastbourne International, which is held at the Devonshire Park Lawn Tennis Club in Eastbourne. If they want to acclimatise themselves to being in London, however, then they can play in the Surbiton Trophy. As with Eastbourne, it actually has both men’s and women’s tournaments, both singles and doubles, but the fact that women can’t play at Queen’s means many consider it to be for them.
The Surbiton Trophy was held annually in Surbiton between 1997 and 2008 and was part of the ATP Challenger Series and the ITF Women’s Circuit. That was replaced by the Aegon Trophy in Nottingham in 2009, but it returned to both of them in 2015. Hosted by the Surbiton Racket and Fitness Club in South West London, it wasn’t held in 2020 or 2021 because of the global health crisis of the time. In 2023, Yanina Wickmayer became the first person to win both the women’s singles and the women’s doubles title in the same year. Unlike Wimbledon, all of the disciplines are played in a best-of-three sets format.