Graham Taaffe runs Padel Tennis London and opened his first court 10 years ago at Hazelwood in Enfield, the tennis club from which he leases the land.
At the Landsown tennis club in Bath, for example, a planning application to replace a tennis court with two padel courts was rejected last year after local residents objected.
Similar plans to build three padel courts at St George’s Hill lawn tennis club near Weybridge in Surrey were shelved last month because of complaints from locals about the potential disturbance.
Taaffe acknowledges that padel is louder than tennis but says that at root it’s an argument about the sound of a sports game emerging from a sports club.
Invented in Mexico in 1969, and said to be the fastest growing sport in the world, padel is a mashup of tennis and squash played within a mesh-and-glass caged court with what look like oversized table-tennis bats – the kind of rackets, according to offended ears, that make a racket.
