Northamptonshire padel facility seeks expansion with extra court planned

An existing padel facility in Northamptonshire has submitted plans for an additional court as operators look to keep up with growing demand for the sport. The move adds to a busy planning picture in West Northamptonshire, where padel has become one of the clearest signs of how quickly the game is spreading.

The pressure on space is already visible in Northampton. A planning committee report for application 2025/4502/FULL covered Riverside Prime, Unit 8, Carousel Way, where a warehouse was proposed for conversion into an indoor padel tennis, wellness and therapy area with associated facilities. The report classed it as major development because the change of use covered more than 1,000 square metres of floorspace, a reminder that padel growth here is no longer limited to one or two courts tucked into spare corners of existing sites.

West Northamptonshire Council has already dealt with that pressure in public. It rejected controversial plans for two new padel courts in a Northampton neighbourhood, underlining how quickly the sport is colliding with local planning limits as demand rises. At the same time, another proposal for a new padel tennis centre at Delapré Golf Centre appeared in the council’s latest list of applications, showing the county’s pipeline of padel projects is still widening.

Padel Power, which says it is one of the UK’s largest indoor padel venues in Northampton, has also been part of that growth. Its news page describes the premium indoor club as open in Northampton, and the latest extra-court proposal suggests even established sites are still trying to add capacity. For a sport that has spent the last few years hunting for space, the message from Northamptonshire is straightforward: the market is still asking for more courts than the current build-out can comfortably supply.