The man who designed Wimbledon has seen the plans. He is not impressed. Here is what he would do instead.
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Putney News 26th April 2026 Kieren McCarthy
The architect who designed Wimbledon in the 1990s on what the approved expansion gets wrong, and how to fix it.
This week, Richard Rees stood up in St Mark’s Church in Wimbledon and told 150 supporters of the Save Wimbledon Park movement what he thought of the All England Club’s approved plans to expand the world’s most famous tennis tournament.
He was not polite.
Rees is not a campaigner or a local resident. He is what is termed a “master planner”. And it was in that role that he designed the Wimbledon tournament’s first big step into the world of modern tennis in the 1990s; the one that shaped Wimbledon as it exists today. His team coined the phrase that has became Wimbledon’s defining identity: ‘Tennis in an English garden.’
Rees has gone on to design Olympic tennis venues at Sydney, Athens, Beijing and Rio. He planned the regeneration of Liverpool city centre and worked on the Hong Kong waterfront. He is, in short, precisely the person whose opinion on a Wimbledon master plan you would most want to hear.
Two years ago, a friend suggested he look at the All England’s approved expansion scheme. He had not seen it. He looked. What he found troubled him so much that he has spent the past year designing an alternative.
“Frankly, I was confused and disappointed,” he told attendees who had come to hear him on Wednesday evening, the day after Parliament had stripped another layer of legal protection from Wimbledon Park without a vote.
