A London diary entry on the capital’s first city-wide padel festival, why I’d never even heard of the UK’s fastest-growing sport, and what it feels like to stumble into a new obsession at Wembley on a Wednesday
London Padel Week has been running across five clubs this month, more than fifty events spanning coaching sessions, social tournaments, and DJ sets from Wembley to Stratford, and I went along mostly out of curiosity and came away having genuinely never heard of a sport that is apparently, quietly, the fastest-growing one in the entire country.
Why I’d Somehow Missed An Entire Sporting Movement Happening Around Me
Padel, for anyone as behind as I evidently was, is this strange, brilliant hybrid of tennis and squash played in a smaller, enclosed court, and apparently it has been building a genuinely devoted following across the capital for a while now without my noticing at all. It’s a slightly humbling feeling, discovering that an entire recreational subculture has been thriving a few tube stops away the whole time you’ve been complaining you never try anything new.
What Actually Happened The First Time I Picked Up A Racket
I was, unsurprisingly, terrible, and also completely hooked within about fifteen minutes. There’s something about the smaller court and the walls being properly part of the game that makes it feel considerably more forgiving for a genuine beginner than tennis ever did for me, and I left the coaching session with the specific, slightly manic enthusiasm of someone who has just found a new hobby to become insufferable about.
How The Whole Festival Felt Different From The Usual London Sports Scene
Between the courtside socialising, the Italian food and drink tastings, and the genuinely mixed crowd of total beginners and clearly serious regulars, the whole week had a looseness to it that felt quite different from the more self-serious fitness culture I’m used to encountering around this city. Nobody seemed remotely bothered that I was catastrophically bad; everyone just seemed pleased I’d turned up at all.
What This Whole Week Taught Me About How I Actually Engage With London
I think I default, most of the time, to the version of this city I already know, the same handful of parks and pubs and routes, and it takes something like a genuinely new, unexpected festival landing right in front of me to remind me how much I’m still not seeing. London rewards curiosity in a way that’s easy to forget when you’re stuck in your own established routine.
Whether I’m Actually Going To Keep Playing Now The Festival Week Is Over
Genuinely, yes. I’ve already looked up a local court for a proper lesson, which feels like exactly the kind of small, slightly impulsive decision this whole odd, dry, eventful month has been nudging me toward. Turns out the fastest-growing sport in the country was hiding in plain sight, and all it took was one padel week to finally notice.