All England Lawn Tennis Club Explained: Members and Role

For fifty weeks of the year the gates on Church Road are closed and the road outside is an ordinary suburban route between Wimbledon and Southfields. Behind them, a private members' club with a few hundred people on its books maintains a large number of grass courts, a croquet lawn and a clubhouse, and for the other two weeks it stages one of the largest annual sporting events in the world and hands the profits to somebody else.

That arrangement is unusual enough to be worth explaining properly. Most major sporting events are owned by governing bodies, by commercial promoters or by leagues. Wimbledon is owned by a club that predates lawn tennis itself, that was set up to play croquet, and whose membership is smaller than that of a mid-sized golf club in the same county. The relationship between that club, the company that runs the tournament, and the national governing body is the single most misunderstood thing about the Championships, and it is not complicated once the entities are separated out.

What the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club actually is

It is a private members' club, incorporated and run as such, with a committee, a membership roll and a clubhouse. It is not a governing body, it is not a public institution, and it has no authority over tennis anywhere outside its own boundaries. Its full and current name is The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, and every word in that title is a fossil of a different stage in its history.

• 1868Club founded
• 1877First Championships
• 1899Croquet restored to the name
• 1922Moved to Church Road

Fixed dates in the club's own published history. The 1899 entry refers to croquet being restored to the club's title, not to its resumption as an activity.

It was founded in 1868 as The All England Croquet Club, on leased ground off Worple Road in Wimbledon. Lawn tennis, patented in the mid-1870s as an outdoor game for garden parties, was introduced to one of the club's lawns in 1875. It proved so much more popular than croquet that within two years the club had added tennis to its name and held a tournament, and within a decade it had almost entirely reorganised itself around the new game.

The club's legal personality has changed since. The important structural point is that the club owns the freehold of the land at Church Road and the buildings on it, and that it is the club, rather than any tennis authority, that decides what happens there. When people ask who owns Wimbledon, the ownership of the physical place is the easy half of the answer.

The harder half is the tournament, which is a separate thing from the site, and which is run by a separate entity for reasons that go back to 1922 and to a bargain struck with the governing body that has shaped British tennis ever since.

The club and the Championships company: two entities, one fortnight

The Championships are staged by a company called The All England Lawn Tennis Club (Championships) Limited. Its shares are held by the club and by the Lawn Tennis Association. That company employs the staff, signs the broadcast and licensing contracts, sells the tickets and files accounts, and its surplus is paid to the LTA.

Body	What it is	What it does
The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club	Private members' club, founded 1868	Owns the Church Road site; elects its own members; sets the character of the place
AELTC (Championships) Limited	Company owned jointly by the club and the LTA	Stages the Championships, holds the commercial contracts, pays the surplus onward
The Lawn Tennis Association	National governing body for tennis in Britain	Runs the sport nationally; receives the Championships surplus; nominates members to the Championships committee

Keeping these apart clears up most of the standard confusions. The club does not run British tennis. The LTA does not own Wimbledon. The Championships are not a private jolly for a few hundred members, because the money does not stay with them. And the reason the club and the governing body sit in the same company is historical: when the club moved to Church Road it needed capital, the LTA was part of the arrangement that financed the move, and the joint structure that emerged has survived ever since.

The practical division of labour is roughly this. Decisions about the site, the character of the tournament, the traditions and the membership belong to the club. Decisions about how the surplus is spent on tennis in Britain belong to the LTA. Decisions about the running of the fortnight belong to a committee on which both are represented. It works because the two bodies want broadly the same thing and because the money flows in only one direction, which removes most of the arguments before they start.

Full membership, and how few there are

The club's full membership is small and deliberately so. The figure the club publishes is 375 full members, a number that has been stable for a long time and that moves only when someone dies or resigns. Alongside the full members there are honorary members, and a group of temporary members elected each year, drawn largely from British players and from people who serve the sport in other capacities.

1. 1A vacancy arisesThe full membership is capped, so a place only opens when an existing member dies or resigns.
2. 2A candidate is proposedAn existing member proposes a name. Nobody can put themselves forward.
3. 3A seconder is foundA second existing member supports the nomination.
4. 4The candidate is consideredThe committee assesses the nomination. Service to the club or to the sport carries weight; wealth on its own does not.
5. 5ElectionThe committee elects, or does not. No reasons are given and there is no appeal.
6. 6Membership beginsThe new member gains the use of the club and an allocation of Championships tickets, and the roll returns to its capped size.

The process as the club describes it. There is no application form, no published waiting list and no fee that secures a place.

There is no route in for the general public and no amount of money that buys a place. This is worth stating plainly because a persistent myth holds that a large enough donation, or the purchase of a debenture, confers membership. It does not. Debentures are a separate financial instrument, issued in five-year series against seats on the main show courts, and they buy tickets rather than standing in the club; our page on Wimbledon debentures sets out how they actually work.

Members receive an allocation of Championships tickets, which is the benefit outsiders fixate on and the one members mention least. What membership more usually amounts to is access to a very good set of grass courts in south-west London for the ten and a half months when the world is not watching, and a role in an institution that most members have some connection to through the sport.

The smallness of the roll is a deliberate design feature rather than an accident. A larger membership would mean a larger claim on Centre Court seats, more people with a say in how the club is run, and a slower and more contested decision-making process. The club has chosen to stay small and to let the tournament grow instead.

Honorary membership for champions

Winning a singles title at the Championships brings an invitation to become an honorary member. That is the origin of the tradition of the champion's tie and badge, and it is why past winners appear in the grounds, in the members' enclosure and in the Royal Box for decades after their last match.

Honorary membership is granted for life and carries the use of the club along with an allocation of tickets. It is the club's most meaningful gesture, because it converts a fortnight's achievement into a permanent relationship. A player who wins Wimbledon at twenty-two acquires a place they can return to at seventy, and a great many of them do.

The gesture has not always been made gracefully. Fred Perry, who won three consecutive titles in the 1930s, spent the rest of his life recounting that his honorary member's tie had been left on a chair in the dressing room rather than handed to him. Whatever the truth of the detail, the club's later conduct suggests it took the criticism seriously; a statue of Perry now stands in the grounds and the gates beside it carry his name. The full sweep of who has and has not been welcomed at Church Road runs through our page on British Wimbledon champions.

The convention applies to the singles champions. Whether and how it extends to winners of the other events has varied, and rather than assert a rule that may not hold across every era, it is more accurate to say that the club has treated honorary membership as a discretionary honour and has extended it beyond the singles champions on occasion.

The committees that run the Championships

The tournament is governed by a Committee of Management, composed of members of the club's own committee together with a group nominated by the LTA. That body takes the decisions that determine what the Championships are: the prize money, the format changes, the site development, the ticketing policy and the wild cards.

Beneath it sit the operational roles. The Referee of the Championships is responsible for the conduct of play, which means the order of play, suspensions, resumptions, court allocation and the exercise of the various discretions written into the rulebook. It is the busiest job on the grounds and the one that produces the most public second-guessing, since every decision to move a match or to close a roof visibly affects several thousand people. The mechanics of that job are described in our page on the Wimbledon order of play.

The chairmanship of the club is the senior office. It is not a ceremonial post; the chair leads the Committee of Management, fronts the tournament publicly and carries responsibility for the strategic decisions, including the site expansion. Debbie Jevans became the club's first woman chair in 2023, which was a notable change for an institution that had been chaired exclusively by men since 1868.

Where the discretions live

A surprising amount of what happens at the Championships is discretionary rather than rule-bound, and knowing where the discretion sits explains a lot of otherwise inexplicable decisions. Wild cards into the main draw are issued by the committee, with no obligation to justify the choices, and are used in practice to support British players and to accommodate former champions returning from injury. Court allocation is the referee's. Seeding is signed off by a small committee working from the tour rankings. The Royal Box invitation list is drawn up by the chair's office. Each of those has its own page: the wild card system, how seeding works and the Royal Box are all worth reading if you want to understand who decides what.

The LTA, the surplus and where the money goes

The Championships make a large surplus and it does not stay at Church Road. The company that stages the tournament passes its surplus to the Lawn Tennis Association, which uses it, along with its other income, to fund tennis across Britain.

1. 1Championships revenueBroadcast rights, ticket sales, licensing, hospitality, catering concessions and merchandising across the fortnight.
2. 2Costs of stagingPrize money, staff, security, court preparation, temporary infrastructure and the year-round maintenance of the site.
3. 3Surplus declaredWhat remains is the surplus of AELTC (Championships) Limited, reported in its filed accounts.
4. 4Paid to the LTAThe surplus passes to the national governing body rather than being distributed to club members.
5. 5Spent on British tennisFacilities, participation programmes, competition, coaching, officiating and the performance pathway.
6. 6Reinvested at Church RoadSeparately, the club funds its own capital projects, largely through debenture issues rather than from the surplus.

The structure of the flow rather than any specific sum. Amounts vary year to year and are published in the filed accounts of the two bodies.

The scale of that transfer is what makes the LTA unusual among British governing bodies. Most national federations depend on membership fees, public funding and their own commercial income. British tennis has all of those and, on top of them, a share of the proceeds of one of the most valuable events in the sport, which gives it a level of funding that its participation numbers alone would never generate.

What that money should be spent on has been argued about for as long as it has existed, and the argument is legitimate. A governing body with a large guaranteed income can spend it on a small performance programme aimed at producing champions, or on facilities and participation aimed at getting more people onto courts, and the two objectives compete for the same pot. Our pages on what the LTA does for British tennis and how British tennis is funded go through the allocation in more detail than there is room for here.

One clarification that comes up often: the club's members do not take a dividend. The surplus is not distributed to them, and membership is not a financial investment. Whatever else can be said about the closed nature of the membership, the money is not the reason to want in.

The Church Road site and what the club owns

The club moved from Worple Road to Church Road in 1922, a mile or so north, onto a larger site that could accommodate a purpose-built Centre Court. The new ground was opened by King George V, and the Challenge Round, under which the defending champion had sat out the tournament and played only the winner of the All Comers' Singles, was abolished in the same year. The move and the rule change together mark the point at which the Championships became recognisably the modern tournament.

The main grounds hold eighteen match courts used during the Championships, along with practice courts, the clubhouse, the museum and the broadcast and hospitality infrastructure that goes up each summer. Aorangi Park, on the northern edge of the site, was acquired from a New Zealand sports and social club and now provides practice courts and the grassed slope that spectators sit on to watch the big screen.

Beyond the main grounds, the club holds a much larger area of land: the former Wimbledon Park golf course, whose freehold the club purchased in 1993 and whose leasehold it acquired from the golf club's members in 2018. That acquisition roughly trebled the club's landholding and is the basis of everything in the expansion plans described further down this page.

The site straddles a borough boundary, with the main grounds in Merton and much of the golf course land in Wandsworth. That single administrative fact has shaped the planning history of the expansion more than any other, because it meant two local authorities with different views had to consider the same scheme.

Qualifying, notably, is not held at Church Road. It takes place at the Bank of England Sports Ground at Roehampton, a few miles away, which has long been regarded as an unsatisfactory arrangement for an event of the Championships' standing; our page on Wimbledon qualifying at Roehampton explains what it involves and why the club wants to move it.

Croquet roots and how tennis took the lawns

The club was founded to play croquet, which in the 1860s was a serious competitive pastime with a national following. Lawn tennis arrived in 1875 as an addition, took one lawn, and then took the rest.

The name records the struggle. In 1877 croquet and lawn tennis appeared together in the title. In 1882 croquet was dropped altogether, and the club became simply The All England Lawn Tennis Club, which reflected the commercial reality. In 1899 croquet was restored, on sentimental grounds rather than practical ones, producing the full name the club still uses. That sequence of three changes in twenty-two years is a fair summary of what happened to the two games.

Croquet is still played. The club maintains lawns for it, members use them, and the word has never come out of the title again. It survives as an acknowledgement of where the institution came from rather than as a major activity, and it gives the club the distinction of being the most famous tennis venue in the world with a second sport in its legal name.

The change also explains something about the grass. A croquet lawn and a tennis court want similar things from turf: a hard, true, closely mown surface that plays fast and low. The club's expertise in grass management, which is now one of its defining assets, began with a game played with mallets. What that expertise involves today, in soil composition, seed mixture, mowing height and the annual renovation cycle, is covered in our guide to how the Wimbledon grass courts are prepared.

What members do with the club for fifty weeks a year

Outside the fortnight, the club functions as a club. Members play on the grass courts in the summer months, on the hard and indoor courts in the winter, and use the clubhouse, the croquet lawns and the practice facilities.

The show courts are the exception. Centre Court is not a members' court in any ordinary sense; it is used for the Championships and for a small number of other occasions, and it is otherwise left alone. This is not snobbery but agronomy. A grass court that is played on heavily cannot be brought to championship condition in July, and the surface is managed on an annual cycle that assumes a fortnight of intensive use followed by ten months of recovery and renovation.

The playing season for members on grass is correspondingly short, which is the same constraint that shapes the British grass-court circuit as a whole. Grass takes months to prepare and weeks to destroy, and no club in the country, including this one, can run grass courts all year. That is why the domestic grass season lasts a matter of weeks and why the rest of the year is played on other surfaces.

Membership therefore involves a fair amount of hard-court tennis in February, which is not the image the Championships project but is closer to the daily reality of the place. The club also hosts a range of internal competitions and social events, and it maintains the museum, which is open to the public for much of the year and is the one part of the site most people will actually get to see from the inside.

The rhythm of the year is dictated by the courts rather than by the calendar. Renovation begins within days of the final, when the courts are stripped back, reseeded and left to establish through the autumn. The grass grows through the winter and is gradually brought down in height through the spring, so that by the time the domestic grass season begins the surface is at championship length and firmness. Members' play is fitted around that schedule rather than the other way about, and the grounds staff have the final say on which courts open and when. It is one of the few sporting institutions in the country where the head groundsman's judgement routinely overrides everybody else's preferences, and the results on the second Sunday in July are the argument for it.

The Wimbledon Park project and the planning fight

The expansion is the largest thing the club has attempted since the move to Church Road. The scheme, built on the former golf course land, is designed around a substantial number of new grass courts and a new show court, and its central purpose is to bring qualifying onto the main site so that the Championships run as a three-week event in one place rather than a fortnight in Wimbledon preceded by a week in Roehampton.

The planning history has been contested and it is not a simple story. The land sits across two boroughs, which considered the application separately and did not agree. The Greater London Authority subsequently took a decision on the scheme. Campaign groups opposed to building on the parkland then pursued the matter through the courts, and the litigation has passed through more than one stage. Because the position has moved several times, this page deliberately does not state a final outcome; the club's own planning pages and the published court records are the right sources for where matters currently stand.

The substance of the objection is worth understanding regardless of the outcome. Wimbledon Park is registered as a historic landscape, with a lake and grounds associated with eighteenth-century landscape design, and there are long-standing legal restrictions attached to the land arising from how it was originally sold. Opponents argue that a development of this scale on protected parkland is exactly what those restrictions exist to prevent. The club argues that the scheme delivers substantial new public parkland alongside the courts and that the alternative is a tournament permanently constrained by a site it has outgrown.

There is a second strand to the objection that is less about heritage and more about precedent. Land held under restrictions of this kind exists across London, much of it former private estates sold to public bodies on terms intended to keep it open, and a decision that allows building on one such parcel is watched closely by everyone with an interest in the others. The club's answer is that the alternative uses of a disused golf course are not obviously better for the public, and that a scheme delivering managed parkland with public access is a material improvement on land that was, for a century, accessible only to the members of a private club.

Both positions are reasonable and the dispute is genuinely about competing goods rather than about a villain. What is not in doubt is the club's motive: the four Grand Slams compete with one another for players, broadcasters and prestige, the other three have expanded their sites substantially, and Wimbledon's is the smallest and the most hemmed in by housing. The comparison with the other majors, on site, format and prize money, is drawn out in our page on how Wimbledon differs from the other Grand Slams.

How the club protects the Wimbledon name

The commercial value of the Championships rests on an unusual proposition: that this tournament looks less commercial than any comparable event. The club protects that appearance with considerable rigour.

There is no advertising around the courts. The only branding visible on Centre Court is the Slazenger name on the net and the Rolex clocks, and those two relationships are among the longest in sport, with Slazenger having supplied the Championships' balls since 1902. Everything else that would carry a hoarding at another venue is left plain green and purple. That restraint is not modesty; it is a pricing strategy, because scarcity of exposure is what makes the exposure worth so much.

The club runs a formal licensing programme covering the Wimbledon name and marks, and it enforces its trademarks actively against unlicensed use. It also polices ambush marketing around the fortnight, since brands with no association to the event have an obvious incentive to appear to have one. Player clothing is governed by a detailed rule that limits the size and placement of manufacturers' logos, which is one of the practical reasons the all-white requirement is written as tightly as it is; our page on the all-white clothing rule covers what the text actually says.

Ticketing is part of the same architecture. The public ballot, the queue, the debenture seats and the hospitality packages are separate channels, each with its own rules, and the club maintains them partly to keep control of who gets in and at what price rather than surrendering that to a secondary market. How the ballot allocates seats is set out in our guide to the Wimbledon ballot.

The consistent thread through all of it is that the club treats the character of the Championships as an asset to be managed rather than a tradition to be indulged. Grass, white clothing, no courtside advertising, a queue, a members' club that owns the place: each of those is defensible on its own terms and each is also a commercial decision. Understanding that the two motives coexist is the key to understanding the institution. For the rest of British tennis beyond SW19, our tennis section has the wider picture, and the England guides hub collects the other sports alongside it.