Tennis club fears eviction as padel courts replace Suffolk site

Victory Ground Tennis Club in Bury St Edmunds faced being pushed out of the Victory Sports Ground after a party proposing padel courts offered the landowner six times the club’s annual rent. The tennis club pays £4,000 a year for two courts, a figure that now looks small against the economics of padel, where a single site can generate far more income from heavier usage.

The club, described as 80 years old in BBC reporting and traced by other reporting to the 1950s, had nearly 200 members, with one account putting the number of players ready to fight for its future at about 180. That member base has become the first line of resistance in a dispute that has turned a local courts rental into a test case for who gets priority when land is scarce.

Victory Ground’s position is familiar across the racket sports world. Padel has moved fast enough in Great Britain to change the value of court space itself, and landowners are now being asked to choose between a smaller tennis rent and a higher padel return. In this case, the landowner was reportedly offered six times more money than the tennis club currently pays, a gap large enough to force the question that sits behind many club-house arguments: is a tennis court still the best use of the land?

The wider numbers show why the pressure keeps building. The Lawn Tennis Association said Great Britain reached 1,000 padel courts across 325 venues on 17 July 2025, up from 68 courts in 2019. That growth has helped turn padel from a niche add-on into a rival claimant for the same urban and suburban sports sites that traditional tennis clubs have occupied for decades.

Local coverage from the East Anglian Daily Times and Suffolk News showed how sharply the issue landed in Bury St Edmunds, where the club feared it could be forced out of the sports facility and replaced by padel. For Victory Ground, the dispute is not just about one rent review. It is about whether an 80-year-old tennis institution can survive when the market for court space has started rewarding a different game.