Nine New Padel Courts Approved in Bushey as Tennis Courts Make Way

A tennis club in Bushey, Hertfordshire, is about to have a lot less tennis in it. Hertsmere Borough Council has granted planning permission for six tennis courts at Metropolitan Sports Club in Aldenham Road to be replaced with nine padel courts, with work already partly underway before consent was formally granted.

The planning documents leave little doubt about the thinking behind the switch, describing padel as "widely heralded as the fastest growing sport in the UK" — an innovative, sociable version of tennis played on a court about a third of the size, where the ball is bounced off surrounding glass panels rather than kept purely in play. Unlike the tennis courts it's replacing, which sit behind high steel-framed wire mesh fencing, the new padel courts will use a mix of walls, mesh and glass panelling instead.

LTA figures show padel has gone from just 15,000 players in Britain in 2019 to a million adults and juniors in 2026, playing across more than 1,800 courts nationwide — one of the steepest participation curves any sport in the country has produced in recent memory. Roughly two-thirds of those players also play tennis, which says a lot about where clubs like Metropolitan are likely finding their new padel players: not from scratch, but from their own existing membership looking for something to play alongside it.

But padel is not only a great addition for those already playing racket sports. It is a very accessible sport — sociable, easy to pick up, playable across a wide range of ages and abilities — and therefore has real potential to get people active who might otherwise not have picked up a racket at all. Padel is exactly the kind of low-barrier, inclusive activity that tends to widen participation rather than simply reshuffle existing players between sports.

But that's also where the tension in stories like Bushey's starts to show. When growth this rapid is met with finite space, something has to give and, in this case, it's tennis courts making way rather than new land being found. For long-standing racket clubs, padel's momentum is as much a pressure as an opportunity: courts, budgets and committee attention are finite, and a trend moving this fast can end up displacing established, well-used facilities rather than sitting comfortably alongside them. Bushey's tennis courts weren't idle relics being repurposed out of necessity — they were an existing facility making room for a newer one, which is a very different story from simply adding capacity.

Whether that trade-off proves worthwhile will likely come down to how well clubs balance the two — using padel's popularity to bring in the wider participation grassroots sport depends on, without quietly squeezing out the sports, and the members, that were there first.