North Yorkshire leisure centre to reopen with indoor padel courts

The Summit Indoor Adventure Centre is set to come back to life in Selby with padel built into a much larger family offer. The long-closed site next to Selby Leisure and Wellbeing Hub will reopen later this summer as a mixed-use destination, with two indoor courts under the Vogue Padel brand, a giant children’s play area, a climbing wall and ten-pin bowling lanes.

For padel, the significance goes beyond two courts. Curly Pepper Trading Ltd is folding the sport into a broader leisure model, the kind operators increasingly favour as they look to turn one activity into a day-long visit rather than a single-purpose booking. The venue is designed for all ages and is described as seamlessly connected to Selby Leisure Centre by a glass walkway, reinforcing the idea that padel is being used here as part of a wider leisure economy, not as a standalone niche.

The redevelopment also gives North Yorkshire Council a visible regeneration project on a site that has been dormant for years. The building opened in May 2016, shut in March 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, and then served as a vaccination centre, handling up to 5,000 people a week at the height of the immunisation effort. After local government reorganisation in March 2023, the council inherited the property and worked to secure a new tenant, a process it says involved significant work to bring the building back into active community use.

That wider civic case matters as much as the sporting one. North Yorkshire Council says the project is intended to increase town-centre footfall, support local businesses and create local jobs, while its Selby vision plan aims to revitalise key locations around Selby Abbey by improving leisure facilities and public spaces. In that context, the padel courts are not just an amenity for players, they are part of a larger attempt to pull spending, activity and repeat visits back toward the centre of town.

Curly Pepper Trading Ltd, which operates seven other indoor adventure parks across the UK, including in Bristol, Hemel Hempstead and Eastbourne, is bringing a proven leisure formula to Selby. The company says it wants the renovation finished in time for the school summer holidays, a launch window that points to the real commercial logic of the project: families, not just racquet-sport regulars, are the target audience. In Selby, padel is arriving as one piece of a regeneration plan built to keep the whole site busy.