The All England Club: A Complete Guide to Wimbledon's Home

The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club is a private members' club in a residential part of south-west London that spends fifty weeks of the year being a private members' club and two weeks being the most famous tennis tournament in the world. Almost everything distinctive about Wimbledon follows from that: the grass, the white clothing, the queue, the absence of advertising hoardings, and the fact that the grounds were laid out for a members' club rather than designed as a stadium.

For the club as an institution — who owns it, how membership works and where the money goes — see the All England Lawn Tennis Club explained. This guide covers the place rather than the tournament results — how the grass is grown and why it is eight millimetres, what each court is and holds, the four separate ways of getting a ticket, what the Queue actually involves, and what the grounds are like to walk around on a Tuesday in the first week.

Croquet first

The club was founded in 1868 as the All England Croquet Club, on four acres off Worple Road in Wimbledon. Lawn tennis, a new game, was added in 1875 because it was more popular than croquet and the club needed the income. In 1877 the club staged the first Lawn Tennis Championship to pay for a broken pony roller. Twenty-two men entered, the final drew about 200 spectators, and the winner received a silver challenge cup.

Croquet is still in the name and the club still has croquet lawns, which is either charming or absurd depending on your view of English institutions.

The club outgrew Worple Road and moved in 1922 to the present site on Church Road, built around a new Centre Court. The move was funded by debentures — the same mechanism that still funds the club's building programme a century later.

The grounds

The Championships use eighteen grass courts. The club has further grass, clay and indoor courts for members, and the practice courts at Aorangi Park behind No.1 Court, where players warm up and where a substantial part of the crowd spends its time watching them do it for free.

Court	Capacity	Notes
Centre Court	14,979	Retractable roof, 2009. Royal Box. Ticketed separately
No.1 Court	12,345	Retractable roof, 2019. Ticketed separately
No.2 Court	4,000	Ticketed separately
No.3 Court	2,000	Grounds Pass admits
Courts 4–18	Varies, mostly unreserved	Grounds Pass admits

Two things follow from that table. First, only three courts require a specific ticket. Second, the Grounds Pass — which admits you to the grounds and to everything from No.3 Court downwards — is by a wide margin the best value in the tournament during the first week, when the outside courts carry full singles matches involving seeded players and doubles involving very well-known ones.

The grass

Wimbledon's surface is the most closely managed playing surface in world sport, and the specification is public.

• 100% perennial ryegrass, changed from a ryegrass and creeping red fescue mixture in 2001 to improve durability under modern play.
• Cut to exactly eight millimetres during The Championships, measured daily.
• Rolled, irrigated and hardness-tested to a defined range, so that bounce is consistent across all eighteen courts.
• Completely renovated each autumn: the surface is scarified, re-levelled, re-sown and grown in over the winter.

The practical consequence is that Wimbledon grass plays faster and lower than clay or hard court, that the bounce degrades visibly as the fortnight progresses — the baseline wear behind each service line is obvious by the second week — and that a player's movement matters more than at any other major. It is also why the tournament is only two weeks long: the courts cannot take more.

The roofs

Centre Court's roof was completed in 2009, and No.1 Court's in 2019. Both are folding concertina structures that take about ten minutes to close, with a further period for the air management system to stabilise humidity and temperature before play resumes — indoor conditions play measurably differently from outdoor ones, and the delay is to make that transition predictable rather than sudden.

The roofs changed the tournament's character more than any other single piece of building work. A rain delay on Centre Court used to end the day; now it costs half an hour. The trade is that a match that starts outdoors and finishes indoors is, in a real sense, two different matches.

The Queue

Wimbledon is the only major tennis tournament in the world that still holds back a substantial number of tickets to sell, on the day, to people who are physically present in a queue.

Here is how it works. A block of Centre Court, No.1 Court and No.2 Court seats, plus several thousand Grounds Passes, are reserved for the Queue. Queuers form up in Wimbledon Park, are issued a numbered Queue Card that establishes their position, and — for the show court tickets — camp overnight. The club publishes a formal Queue Code of Conduct running to several pages, covering tent sizes, one person per card, when you may leave your place, and the prohibition on holding places for people who have not arrived.

For a Grounds Pass in the first week, arriving early in the morning is usually sufficient. For a Centre Court ticket in the second week, an overnight camp is required and even then is not guaranteed.

It is a genuinely unusual thing for a major sporting institution to do. It costs the club a great deal of money in foregone revenue and requires the operation of a small campsite. It has survived because it is the single most effective answer to the criticism that Wimbledon is only for the wealthy.

The four routes in

Route	When	What you get
Public ballot	Entered months ahead, online	Random allocation; you take what you are given
Daily online sale	Released the day before play	Show court and grounds tickets, sold at speed
The Queue	On the day	Show court seats and Grounds Passes
Debentures	Five-year blocks, bought from the club or resold	Guaranteed Centre or No.1 Court seat for every day

Debentures are the exception to Wimbledon's otherwise strict anti-resale position. They are financial instruments: the holder buys a seat for a defined block of years, and the ticket for each day is legally transferable. That is why debenture seats appear openly on resale markets while ordinary Wimbledon tickets do not — and why the front rows of Centre Court are sometimes empty during a first-round match on a Tuesday morning.

Every other Wimbledon ticket is non-transferable and the club cancels tickets it identifies as resold.

Henman Hill

The grass bank beside No.1 Court is formally Aorangi Terrace, named for the New Zealand club that once occupied the land. Nobody calls it that. It became Henman Hill in the late 1990s and has periodically been Murray Mound since; the club uses neither name officially and both are universally understood.

It is where Grounds Pass holders watch the show court matches on the large screen. Bring something waterproof to sit on, arrive early on a big day, and accept that the bank fills completely for any British player in a late-round match.

The all-white rule

Players must wear almost entirely white on court. The rule is applied more strictly at Wimbledon than anywhere else in tennis and covers shoes, caps, wristbands, undergarments and the soles of shoes. A single trim of colour is permitted, no wider than one centimetre.

Players have been sent back to change. It is enforced.

In 2023 the club amended the rule to allow women to wear dark-coloured undershorts, following sustained representation from players about the anxiety of competing in white while menstruating. It was a small change and a significant one, and it is the clearest recent example of the club moving on something it had previously treated as non-negotiable.

Middle Sunday, and the other traditions

Wimbledon traditionally took the middle Sunday as a rest day, playing thirteen days across two weeks. From 2022 the tournament plays through, making it fourteen consecutive days. The old arrangement produced the occasional "People's Sunday", when rain backlogs forced play and tickets were sold cheaply on the day to whoever turned up — those are remembered as the best-natured days in the tournament's history, and their loss is the standard objection to the change.

Other things that are true and often assumed to be myths:

• There is no advertising visible on the show courts. The green and purple are the club's colours, and the commercial partnerships are deliberately kept off the court surrounds.
• Strawberries and cream are sold at a price the club has held down deliberately for decades, and the volume consumed across a fortnight runs to many tonnes.
• The Royal Box on Centre Court seats 74 and is by invitation. Players stopped being required to bow or curtsy to it in 2003, except when the monarch or the Prince of Wales is present.
• From 2025 the tournament uses fully electronic line calling, ending 148 years of human line judges.

Getting there

Church Road, Wimbledon, London, SW19 5AE.

• Southfields (District line) is the closest station, about fifteen minutes' walk along a signed route, with a shuttle bus during The Championships. This is the standard approach.
• Wimbledon (District line, South Western Railway from Waterloo, and the tram) is about twenty-five minutes on foot or a short bus ride on the 493. It has far more capacity and is the better option for leaving.
• Wimbledon Park (District line) is nearest of all but is frequently closed or exit-only during the tournament for crowd control.
• Driving is not practical. The surrounding streets operate a residents' zone during The Championships and there is no public parking at the grounds.

Wimbledon Village, up the hill from the ground, is where the pubs and restaurants are, and it is a twenty-minute walk uphill from the grounds. Southfields, at the bottom, is the more convenient side and much less pleasant.

The museum and the tour

The Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum is open for most of the year and holds the sport's most complete collection, including the trophies and an extensive film and photographic archive. The guided tour covers Centre Court, the Millennium Building, the media facilities and, when available, the players' areas.

Neither runs during The Championships. Both must be booked ahead. Together they take around two hours, and they are the only way to stand on Centre Court's rim without a ticket.

The expansion

The club has proposed developing the adjacent former Wimbledon Park golf course, which it acquired the freehold of, with around 39 new courts and an 8,000-seat show court. The stated purpose is to bring qualifying on site — it is currently played at Roehampton, several miles away — and to bring the grounds in line with the other three majors, all of which have substantially larger footprints.

The Greater London Authority approved it in 2024. It has faced sustained local opposition and legal challenge, largely on the grounds of the site's protected status as Metropolitan Open Land and the covenants attached to it. The outcome is not yet settled, and anyone reading about Wimbledon's future should treat the plan as contested rather than committed.

A day at Wimbledon, hour by hour

Before 9am. The Queue is already long. Gates to the grounds open at 10.00, with show court play starting at 13.00 on Centre Court and 11.00 or earlier elsewhere.

10.00 to 11.00. The best hour of the day for a Grounds Pass holder. The outside courts start, nobody has settled anywhere, and you can walk up to the front row of Court 14 and watch a top-thirty player from three metres away.

11.00 to 13.00. Outside courts in full swing, five or six matches running simultaneously. This is the period that justifies the Grounds Pass entirely.

13.00. Centre Court begins. Aorangi Terrace fills. Much of the crowd migrates to the big screen and the outside courts get quieter, which is precisely when they are best.

Mid-afternoon. The queues for strawberries, for Pimm's and for the shop are at their worst. The far end of the grounds, past Court 18, is consistently the calmest part of the site.

Early evening. The light on the outside courts is the best of the day and the crowd has thinned considerably. Play on the show courts can run to 23.00 under the roofs, and a Grounds Pass holder can stay on the hill until it finishes.

Leaving. Southfields is closest and slowest. Wimbledon station is twenty-five minutes on foot or a short bus ride, has far more services, and is the better exit in almost every circumstance.

Food, drink and what it costs

Wimbledon's catering is extensive and priced across a wide range, and the club has deliberately held some prices down as a matter of policy.

Strawberries and cream are the obvious example: a punnet of Kent strawberries with cream, sold at a price the club has kept close to flat for decades while everything around it rose. Somewhere in the region of 140,000 punnets and thousands of litres of cream go through the grounds in a fortnight.

Pimm's is the other fixture, sold from dedicated bars around the grounds, and it is priced conventionally rather than charitably.

You may bring your own food and drink, within limits — the club publishes an allowance covering a reasonable quantity of food and a fixed alcohol allowance per person, historically one bottle of wine or champagne, or two cans of beer. Bag size limits apply and are enforced at the gate, and there is a left-luggage facility for anything oversized.

Beyond that, the grounds carry everything from sandwich kiosks to fine dining, and the price range across them is wide enough that a Grounds Pass day need not be expensive.

The qualifying tournament

Wimbledon is the only major whose qualifying is played at a different venue from the main draw. Qualifying takes place at the Bank of England Sports Ground in Roehampton, about three miles from Church Road, in the week before The Championships.

It is free or very cheap to attend, the crowds are small, and the tennis is genuinely competitive — players ranked between roughly 100 and 250 in the world, fighting for a main-draw place and the prize money that comes with it. For anyone who wants to watch high-level tennis at close quarters without a ballot, ticket sale or overnight queue, Roehampton in late June is the answer nobody uses.

Bringing qualifying onto the main site is one of the stated purposes of the proposed Wimbledon Park expansion.

Wimbledon compared with the other majors

Measure	Where Wimbledon sits
Surface	Grass — the only major played on it
Main show court	14,979, the smallest main stadium of the four majors
Site size	Much the smallest footprint of the four
Ticketing	The only major with an overnight public queue
Advertising on court	None; the only major with a clear surround
Dress code	The strictest in professional tennis
Session structure	Day sessions only; no separate night ticket
Atmosphere	Quieter and more formal than the US or Australian Opens

The Australian and US Opens both have far larger sites, bigger main stadiums and night sessions. Roland-Garros has more courts and a longer clay-court tradition. Wimbledon's distinctiveness is not scale — it is the surface, the absence of advertising, the Queue and the fact that the whole thing is compressed into a members' club's grounds that were never designed to take 40,000 people a day.

That compression is exactly what the expansion plan is intended to relieve, and it is also, arguably, what makes the place feel the way it does.

Around the grounds

Wimbledon Village, at the top of the hill, is where the restaurants and the good pubs are — the Dog and Fox, the Rose and Crown, and a run of independent places along the High Street. It is a twenty-minute uphill walk from the grounds and is where the players and much of the tennis world stays during the fortnight.

Southfields, at the bottom of the hill, is the practical side: closer to the gates, far less pleasant, and dense with people trying to get home.

Wimbledon Common, a short walk from the village, is a large area of open heath and woodland and is the correct answer to a rain delay that the roofs cannot solve for a Grounds Pass holder.

Wimbledon town centre, around the station, has the chain restaurants, the shopping centre and the transport connections, and is where most people staying overnight will actually be.

A short chronology

Year	What happened
1868	The All England Croquet Club is founded
1875	Lawn tennis added to the club's activities
1877	The first Championships: 22 entrants, one event
1884	Ladies' singles introduced
1922	The club moves to Church Road; Centre Court opens
1968	The Championships become open to professionals
2001	Court grass changed to 100% perennial ryegrass
2009	Centre Court retractable roof completed
2019	No.1 Court roof completed
2022	Play begins on the middle Sunday
2023	Dark undershorts permitted for women
2024	GLA approves the Wimbledon Park expansion
2025	Electronic line calling replaces line judges

Five things visitors get wrong

1. Assuming you need a show court ticket. A first-week Grounds Pass gets you eight hours of high-quality tennis at close range for a fraction of the price.
2. Underestimating the Queue. For a Grounds Pass it is manageable; for a second-week Centre Court seat it means a night in a tent.
3. Leaving via Southfields. Walk to Wimbledon station instead. More trains, more directions, less queue.
4. Buying from a resale site. Only debenture tickets are legitimately transferable. Everything else is cancelled.
5. Not walking the outside courts. Courts 12 to 18 in the first week are where the tournament actually happens, and most first-time visitors spend the day on the hill instead.

The seedings, and why they are unusual

Wimbledon used to be the only major that did not seed strictly by world ranking. For the men's draw the club applied a published formula that weighted grass-court results from the previous two seasons on top of the ATP ranking, on the reasonable basis that a clay-court specialist's ranking is a poor predictor of what they will do on grass.

The formula was retired for the 2021 Championships and the men's seeding now follows the ranking, as the women's always did. The reasoning given was that the grass-court calendar had changed enough — a longer gap between Roland-Garros and Wimbledon, more grass events — that the correction was no longer needed.

It is worth knowing because it explains a common piece of Wimbledon history: seedings in the men's draw before 2021 frequently did not match the world rankings, and that was deliberate rather than an error.

Accessibility

The show courts have designated wheelchair positions with companion seating, allocated through a dedicated accessible ticket route rather than the ballot or the general sale. Centre Court and No.1 Court are lift-served. The grounds are largely level, though the site slopes and some of the paths between the outside courts are narrow and get extremely congested in the middle of the day.

The club runs an assistance service from the gates, provides audio-descriptive commentary on the show courts, and operates accessible facilities across the grounds. Aorangi Terrace, being a grass bank, has designated viewing positions at its base.

Anyone using the Queue should note that it is not a realistic route for many disabled visitors, and the accessible ticket route exists precisely because of that.

• 14979Centre Court
• 12345No.1 Court
• 18Championship courts
• 8Grass height

Court capacities are for The Championships configuration.

1. 1The public ballotEntered online months ahead. Random allocation, and you take the day you are given.
2. 2The daily online saleReleased the day before play, and gone within minutes.
3. 3The QueueOn-the-day show court seats and several thousand Grounds Passes, for people physically present.
4. 4DebenturesFive-year seat rights bought from the club, guaranteed for every day, and legally resellable.

Only debenture tickets are legally transferable. Everything else is cancelled if resold.

Is it worth it?

If you can get a Grounds Pass in the first week, it is the best value ticket in world sport. Eighteen courts, no reserved seating on most of them, seeded players two metres away, and the ability to walk out of one match into another whenever the tennis stops being interesting.

Centre Court in the second week is a different proposition — expensive, formal, and genuinely one of the great sporting rooms. But the club's real character is on the outside courts on a Tuesday, on a members' ground in a residential suburb, on eight millimetres of ryegrass that will be dug up and re-sown in October.

A note on the names

Three names get used interchangeably and it is worth separating them.

The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club is the private members' club that owns the grounds and stages the event. The Championships, Wimbledon is the tournament's formal name — the club's usage is "The Championships", capitalised, rather than "the Wimbledon Championships". Wimbledon is the district of south-west London the club sits in, and also a railway station, a town centre and a common on the hill above.

The practical consequence is a familiar mix-up: Wimbledon station is not the closest station to the tennis, Wimbledon Park station is often closed during the fortnight, and Southfields — which has no Wimbledon in its name at all — is the one the signage points you to.

What the grounds are like out of season

For fifty weeks of the year the All England Club is a private members' club with a waiting list, and the grounds are quiet. The courts are under renovation for much of the autumn and winter, growing in the ryegrass that will be cut to eight millimetres the following June.

The museum and the tour run through most of that period and are the best time to visit if your interest is in the place rather than the tournament: no crowds, full access to Centre Court's rim, and a chance to see how small the site actually is once 40,000 people a day are not standing on it.

The grass-court season around it

Wimbledon sits at the centre of a very short grass-court season, and the surrounding events are worth knowing about because they are far easier to attend.

The Queen's Club Championships in west London and the Rothesay International at Eastbourne are the main British lead-in events, played in the fortnight before The Championships. Both feature players ranked in the world's top twenty, both are a fraction of the price, and both are considerably easier to get tickets for.

For anyone who wants to watch top-level grass-court tennis in England without a ballot, a queue or an overnight camp, the two weeks before Wimbledon are the answer, and almost nobody outside tennis knows they exist.

The debentures, and how the club is funded

Wimbledon has funded almost every major building project on the site the same way since 1920: by issuing debentures.

A debenture is a five-year instrument. The holder pays a substantial sum up front and receives a guaranteed seat on Centre Court or No.1 Court for every day of The Championships across the five years covered, plus access to debenture-holders' facilities. At the end of the term the capital is returned.

The club uses the money raised to build. Centre Court's roof, No.1 Court's roof and the earlier redevelopments were all financed this way, which means the stadium improvements are paid for by the people who will sit in them rather than by borrowing against future revenue.

It is also why debenture tickets are the only Wimbledon tickets that can legally be resold, and why a resale market exists at all for an event that otherwise voids transferred tickets. If you see Centre Court seats openly for sale at a high price, they are debenture seats, and the transaction is legitimate.