Fifty events, five clubs, and an entire city apparently ready to swap five-a-side for something involving a very small racket.
London Padel Week wrapped up this past week, a full city-wide festival dedicated to a sport that, roughly eighteen months ago, most of my friends could not have identified in a police lineup, spread across more than fifty events at five different clubs, from Wembley to Stratford, complete with coaching sessions, social tournaments, DJ sets, and, in what felt like a very London touch, Italian food and drink tastings squeezed in between the actual matches.
For anyone who has somehow missed it, padel is a sort of hybrid of tennis and squash, played on a smaller, enclosed court, with a smaller racket and considerably more shouting than either parent sport typically produces. It is, by every metric anyone tracks, the UK’s fastest-growing sport right now, and this week gave the clearest visible proof of that growth I have personally witnessed: courts booked solid from breakfast through last light, complete beginners in borrowed trainers standing next to people who were, unmistakably, taking this extremely seriously.
I went along on the Wednesday, ostensibly for work, mostly out of curiosity about whether the hype could possibly be real, and ended up staying for three hours and two matches I was distinctly unqualified to be playing in. What struck me most was not the sport itself, though it is genuinely, addictively fun in a way that surprised me, but the sheer social ease of the whole afternoon. Padel courts are small enough that you are constantly a few feet from your opponents, close enough for actual conversation between points, which makes the whole experience feel considerably less like exercise and considerably more like a slightly athletic social club that happens to also leave you sweating.
That social element might genuinely explain why this particular sport has caught on here specifically, in a city where making new friends as an adult has become its own small, quietly discussed crisis. Padel gives you a built-in, low-stakes reason to show up somewhere regularly, see the same faces, improve together at something none of you were any good at six months ago. It scratches an itch five-a-side football, for all its own merits, never quite managed for people who did not grow up playing it: an entry point with a genuinely gentle learning curve and none of the intimidation of walking onto a pitch where everyone else has clearly played since primary school.
Whether London Padel Week becomes an annual fixture on the city’s increasingly crowded calendar of niche festivals remains to be seen, though judging by how solidly booked every court I walked past was, I would not bet against it. For a city constantly being told it is losing its sense of community to screens and overpriced everything, watching several hundred strangers cheerfully learn to mishit a small yellow ball together, week after week, felt like a genuinely good sign, whatever it says about my own hand-eye coordination, which, for the record, did not improve nearly as much as I had hoped over those three hours.
I spoke briefly with one of the coaches running beginner sessions at the Stratford club, who told me, with the specific patient enthusiasm of someone who has clearly answered this exact question many times this week, that most first-time players come back within a fortnight, which tracks with everything I witnessed that afternoon. There is something genuinely disarming about a sport low-stakes enough that being visibly bad at it, as I very much was, does not seem to embarrass anyone, players included, a rarer quality in London’s often status-conscious fitness scene than I would like to admit.
I have already, somewhat against my own better financial judgement, looked into membership options at my nearest club. Fifty events and one very sweaty Wednesday afternoon later, London Padel Week appears to have done exactly what it presumably set out to do, and I suspect I am now one of several thousand fresh converts the city’s existing padel community will simply have to make room for.
More from this author at Lowri Griffiths, prat.uk.