New padel venue planned for East Midlands business park

The East Midlands’ padel build-out is moving into business parks, and Play PDL is the clearest sign yet. Set to open in August at Pera Business Park in Melton Mowbray, the venue will bring six indoor padel courts into a site planners described as a sports and wellbeing hub.

The concept goes well beyond court time. Play PDL’s launch materials pitch indoor padel alongside Pilates and yoga, a wellness clinic, coffee, co-working space, meeting rooms and a podcast studio, while its business-facing offer is built around corporate wellbeing, team events, sponsorship and networking. The venue is already inviting partnership enquiries and priority-access sign-ups ahead of opening.

That model lands in a market where demand is still outpacing infrastructure. The LTA says padel participation in Great Britain rose from about 15,000 players in 2019 to more than 860,000 by the end of 2025, while the number of courts climbed to 1,553 across 559 venues. The same LTA data puts an average off-peak court booking at £7 per person per hour, or £27 per hour for a doubles booking, a useful benchmark for a sport still trying to keep access broad as supply expands.

Pera’s appeal is practical as well as symbolic. The park is home to more than 80 businesses, and planning advisers said the project was intended to bring a redundant building back into use while strengthening the long-term resilience and attractiveness of the site. That is exactly why padel is drifting into mixed-use commercial settings: it can capture lunchtime users, after-work players and corporate groups in the same footprint, turning a single sport into a broader destination.

The East Midlands is already showing that pattern elsewhere. Nottingham’s £1m Padelplex project was launched by hotelier Richard Johal and 200 Degrees Coffee founder Rob Darby, with James Taylor as ambassador, underscoring how hospitality operators and sports names are treating padel as a leisure-and-business proposition rather than a standalone racket-sport box. The LTA’s 2024 to 2029 padel strategy is pushing the same direction, with a phased plan to integrate, build, accelerate and scale infrastructure, coaching and participation across Britain.