Wimbledon Times: Triple legal jeopardy for All England Club, warns Paul Kohler

Wimbledon Times | 27 November 2025 | Paul Kohler

"Much like the protagonists in Charles Dickens’ fictional satire on the English legal system, I fear something similar is happening here in SW19 - due, not to the manifest failings of our civil justice system, but the dogged intransigence of the All England Club.

The AELTC is currently facing triple legal jeopardy.

• The planning permission they were eventually granted by the Mayor of London, after Labour’s Merton’s Council gave, but their colleagues in neighbouring Wandsworth withheld, consent, is once more in doubt.

Earlier this month the Court of Appeal granted Save Wimbledon Park (SWP) permission to appeal an earlier decision of the High Court, dismissing SWP’s application for judicial review, on the basis they had a "real prospect of success".

• In an entirely separate legal action, the High Court is due to determine, in a case to be heard this January, whether the portion of Wimbledon Park they bought from the Council back in 1993 was, at the time, subject to a public trust of land.

This is important for, according to the recent Supreme Court decision of Day v Shropshire Council, if, at the time of purchase, that was the case, the trust still persists today, because there’s no suggestion the Council complied with the necessary processes that exist to protect such public rights, by transparently terminating the trust when they sold the freehold.

• Even if the All England Club successfully surmounts both the first two hurdles, they still have to confront the biggest obstacle of them all - the legal promises they made in 1993 to never build on the land.

According to the relevant case law, those undertakings, known as covenants, are pretty watertight, provided the party that’s owed the obligation, namely Merton Council, chooses to enforce them."

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