Wimbledon Courts Explained: Show Courts to Outside Courts
From Centre Court's fifteen thousand seats down to the corner of Court 18 — Wimbledon courts explained, with what a Grounds Pass actually opens.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Wimbledon Explained19 min read
- Championship courts
- 18
- Centre Court opened
- 1922
- No.1 Court opened
- 1997
- Courts with roofs
- 2
Walk in through Gate 3 on a Tuesday of the first week and the first thing that surprises people is how compact it all is. The Church Road site is smaller than its reputation suggests, and it is built on a slope, so the eighteen championship courts are stacked and terraced rather than laid out on a plain. You can stand at one end of the grounds and be within a five-minute walk of every court in the place, which is the reason a Grounds Pass on day two remains one of the better value days out in British sport.
The courts themselves fall into a clear hierarchy, and the hierarchy governs almost everything: what your ticket buys, which matches you can see, how close you get, and whether you sit down. Understanding it before you arrive is the difference between a well-spent day and eight hours of queueing for the wrong things.
The shape of the grounds
The site divides into three zones. The show courts occupy the southern and central part — Centre Court at the heart, No.1 Court immediately to its north-west, with No.2 and No.3 Courts further out. The numbered outside courts fill the eastern and southern edges in tight rows. And the northern end of the site, up the hill, is Aorangi Park: the practice courts and the grass bank that faces the big screen.
- Centre Court ticketAdmits you to Centre Court and to the grounds and all unreserved outside courts.
- No.1 Court ticketAdmits you to No.1 Court and to the grounds and all unreserved outside courts.
- No.2 or No.3 Court ticketAdmits you to that court and to the grounds and all unreserved outside courts.
- Grounds PassAdmits you to the grounds and the unreserved outside courts, but never to Centre or No.1 Court.
- Debenture seatA seat on Centre Court or No.1 Court for a defined period of years, with its own separate facilities.
The standing structure of access at the Championships. Individual days and later rounds vary, and the club announces any releases on the day.
Two things follow from that structure. Every ticket is also a Grounds Pass, so a Centre Court ticket holder can wander out and watch a doubles match on Court 14 between sets. And no ticket guarantees you a particular player, because the referee's office assigns matches to courts and can move them. What a show court ticket buys is a seat on that court for whatever is played there.
Centre Court
Centre Court opened in 1922, when the club moved from its original ground on Worple Road to Church Road, and it has been rebuilt around its playing surface several times since. The most recent major reconstruction produced the retractable roof, which opened in 2009 and required an entirely new upper tier and a redesigned bowl.
Capacity now runs to roughly fifteen thousand once seating, standing areas and hospitality are counted. It is a startlingly steep arena from the upper tier and a startlingly intimate one from the lower, and the acoustics under a closed roof are unlike any other tennis venue — the noise has nowhere to go.
The details that make the place are mostly small. The ivy on the outside walls. The Kipling couplet above the players' entrance, which asks them to meet triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same. The Royal Box on the south side, whose seating and protocol are covered in our guide to the Royal Box. And the fact that the court is used for essentially nothing but the Championships, which is why the grass at one end still looks like grass on the second Sunday.
What Centre Court plays like
Two features make it distinctive rather than merely large. The bowl is deep and the surrounding stands are high, so the court is sheltered from wind to an extent that the outside courts are not. And under a closed roof the air is conditioned but humid, and the ball is widely reckoned to travel a fraction more slowly and the surface to grip a fraction more. Players regularly describe the transition from an open Centre Court to a closed one as a change of conditions, which it is — the same court playing two different games in the same afternoon. How the roof achieves that, and what happens in the half hour while it closes, is set out in our guide to the Centre Court roof.
No.1 Court
The No.1 Court most visitors know opened in 1997. Its predecessor was a very different thing: a horseshoe attached to the flank of Centre Court, sharing a wall with it, with a famously fierce atmosphere generated by having several thousand people packed close to the baseline. It was demolished when the new court opened, and a good many long-standing members have never entirely forgiven the club for it.
The replacement is a free-standing bowl seating a little over twelve thousand, with a lower sightline than Centre Court and a shallower rake, which makes the back rows feel further from the tennis than the equivalent seats next door. It gained its own retractable roof in 2019, along with permanent seating additions, and that second roof is what turned a wet Wimbledon from a one-court event into a two-court one.
No.1 Court has developed a character of its own over three decades. It gets the big second-week matches that will not fit on Centre Court, it gets British players who are not yet Centre Court players, and it gets the doubles finals. The crowd is noisier and less restrained, partly because it is further from the Royal Box and partly because the tickets are easier to obtain.
No.2 and No.3 Courts
Below the two roofed arenas sit two smaller ticketed show courts, and they are where a great deal of the best tennis of the first week is actually played.
No.2 Court opened in 2009 as part of the same development programme that produced the Centre Court roof, and seats around four thousand. It is sunk into the ground, so from outside it looks like very little and from inside it is a proper amphitheatre. No.3 Court, which opened a couple of years later, seats around two thousand on the same principle.
The nickname worth knowing belongs to neither of them. The old No.2 Court, which stood elsewhere on the site and has since been renumbered out of existence, was the Graveyard of Champions — a cramped, awkward court with a low surround and a crowd almost on the tramlines, where an alarming number of seeded players lost early. Some of that reputation was genuine and some of it was the sort of thing that becomes true because everybody repeats it. The current courts are more comfortable and considerably less haunted.
| Court | Roughly seats | Opened | Ticketed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Centre Court | 15,000 | 1922, roof 2009 | Yes, separate ticket |
| No.1 Court | 12,000 | 1997, roof 2019 | Yes, separate ticket |
| No.2 Court | 4,000 | 2009 | Yes, separate ticket |
| No.3 Court | 2,000 | Early 2010s | Yes, separate ticket |
| Court 12 | Around 1,000 | 2009 development | No, Grounds Pass |
| Court 18 | Several hundred | 2009 development | No, Grounds Pass |
| Courts 4-17 | Small or standing only | Various | No, Grounds Pass |
The drop from the second court to the third is the steepest step in the whole hierarchy, and it explains why the atmosphere on No.2 Court is so often described as the best on the site. Four thousand people close to a court is a better acoustic environment than fifteen thousand people spread up a steep bowl.
The numbered outside courts
Courts 4 to 18 run along the eastern and southern flanks of the grounds in tight terraced rows, separated by walkways that become impassable when something interesting is happening. Some have permanent seating on one or two sides. Several have almost none, and the view is obtained by standing three deep at a railing.
This is where a first-week Grounds Pass earns its money. The first two rounds of the singles draws put around sixty singles matches into each of the opening days, and the great majority of them are on these courts. You can watch a top-thirty player from six feet away, hear the ball come off the strings, hear what the players say to their boxes, and pay a fraction of a show court price for the privilege.
The trade-off is that you cannot plan. Sight lines fill from mid-morning, the walkways are policed by stewards operating a one-in-one-out system on the busier courts, and a match you wanted to see may finish while you are still queueing for it. Anyone building a day around outside courts should read our guide to the order of play first, because knowing which court number a match has been given is most of the battle.
The courts worth walking to
There is a rough consensus among regulars. Court 12 has permanent seating on two sides and gets strong first-week matches, which makes it the most comfortable of the unreserved courts and therefore the hardest to get into. Court 14 and Court 15 sit close together in the south-east corner and share a crowd, so a good match on one drains the other. The courts on the western edge get sun late into the evening, which is pleasant in June and punishing in a heatwave.
The single best tactic is to go to the far end of the grounds first and work back. Almost everybody enters and stops at the first interesting thing they find, so the courts furthest from the gates are consistently the least crowded for the first hour of the day.
A word about the numbering
The numbering is not a map. Centre Court has no number, the next three courts take the numbers one, two and three as show courts, and the outside courts pick up from four — which is why there is no Court 1 out among the terraces and why visitors looking for it end up at a ticketed arena.
More confusingly, the numbers have been reassigned across successive redevelopments. Courts have been demolished, rebuilt in different places and renumbered, so a reference to Court 13 in an old report is not necessarily a reference to the court that carries that number today. The Graveyard of Champions is the clearest case: the court that earned the nickname is not the No.2 Court a visitor sees now, and anyone hoping to stand at the scene of the famous upsets is standing in the wrong place.
The practical consequence is small but worth knowing. Court numbers on a schedule are reliable for the day they are printed and are a poor guide to anything historical. If you are trying to find a court you remember from television years ago, check the year rather than the number.
Court 18 and the longest match ever played
Court 18 would be an unremarkable outside court in the south-east corner of the grounds were it not for three days in June 2010.
John Isner and Nicolas Mahut met in the first round and could not finish. Wimbledon at that time played no tie-break in the deciding set, so when the fifth set reached six games all the players simply kept holding serve. Play was suspended for darkness on the first evening, resumed the next day, ran through the whole of that day, was suspended for darkness again, and resumed on the third. The final set finished 70-68. The match ran to eleven hours and five minutes of playing time, which remains far longer than any other tennis match on record, and the scoreboard ran out of digits before the players ran out of service games.
A plaque beside the court records it. The rules that made it possible are gone: Wimbledon introduced a deciding-set tie-break and has since aligned with the other majors on a common format, which is set out in our guide to the Wimbledon tie-break rules. Nothing of that length can happen again, which is a large part of why people still walk over to look at a small court in a corner.
Aorangi Park and the practice courts
North of the show courts, up the slope, is Aorangi Park. The name comes from the New Zealand Sports and Social Club, which formerly leased the land, and it is the Māori name for the mountain Europeans call Mount Cook — an unlikely piece of etymology to find in SW19, and one that almost nobody who sits on the grass there knows.
The practice courts occupy the flat part. They are grass, prepared to the same standards as the championship courts, and during the Championships they run a booking system operated by the referee's office: players are allocated slots, and the allocation is a small daily political drama in its own right. Seeds get better slots. Players still in the draw take priority over those who are out.
For a spectator, the practice courts are one of the genuine hidden pleasures of a Grounds Pass. There is a viewing area, the players are close, and watching a top professional hit for forty minutes with no scoreboard tells you more about how the game is actually played than a match does. Access can be restricted when the area is busy, and the club manages the flow, but on a quiet morning it is often the best half hour of the day.
Above the practice courts is the grass bank facing the big screen mounted on the flank of No.1 Court — Aorangi Terrace on the maps, and Henman Hill or Murray Mound to everyone else. Our guide to watching tennis on Henman Hill covers when to claim a spot and what the stewards will and will not allow.
What a Grounds Pass actually opens
The Grounds Pass is the cheapest way in and the most misunderstood ticket at the Championships.
It admits you to the grounds and to the unreserved outside courts. It does not admit you to Centre Court or No.1 Court on any day, in any round, under any circumstances. That is a firm line and no amount of waiting at a turnstile softens it.
The smaller show courts are the ambiguous part. No.2 and No.3 Courts are ticketed for the days when they carry a full schedule, and once their schedules thin out later in the fortnight the club can release them to Grounds Pass holders, announcing it on the day. Treat that as a possibility rather than a plan; the Grounds Pass guide sets out the detail and how the availability changes across the fortnight.
Grounds Passes are also the ticket at the heart of the famous overnight queue, since they are sold on the day in numbers that show court tickets are not. That whole institution — the queue card, the stewards, the campsite in Wimbledon Park — is a subject of its own, covered in our guide to the Wimbledon Queue.
How the courts differ to play on
All eighteen championship courts are built the same way: the same heavy loam profile, the same ryegrass, the same eight-millimetre height of cut, the same rolling regime. The club's stated aim is that they should play identically, and the way that consistency is engineered is set out in our guide to Wimbledon grass court preparation.
They do not, quite, and the reasons are environmental rather than horticultural.
Wear is the biggest one. An outside court that stages four singles matches a day for four days will have baselines worn to soil by the middle weekend, while Centre Court, which hosts three matches a day at most and gets the closest attention, holds its surface far longer. A worn baseline gives a lower, skiddier bounce and worse footing, and by the second week the difference between a heavily used outside court and Centre Court is visible from the walkway.
Wind is the second. The show courts sit in deep bowls and are largely sheltered, though a high wind can swirl inside a stadium in ways that are harder to read than a straightforward crosswind. The outside courts on the perimeter are exposed, and a windy day out there is a genuinely different sport — a tossed ball moving in the air changes a serve, and a lob becomes a lottery.
Shade is the third, and it moves. Courts against the western stands lose the sun early in the evening; courts in the open keep it. A player serving into low sun on an outside court at seven in the evening is dealing with something that no one on Centre Court has to think about, and umpires do occasionally allow a brief pause for it.
Light is the fourth and the most consequential. Only the two roofed courts have floodlighting, so an outside court is playable for exactly as long as the sky allows. On a bright June evening that is late; under heavy cloud it can be surprisingly early, and a court hemmed in by stands goes dark before an open one does. This is the reason the referee's office puts long matches on the roofed courts wherever it can, and the reason a five-set match starting at six on Court 16 is a scheduling risk rather than a scheduling decision.
What changed on every court when the line judges went
For most of the Championships' history, each court carried a full complement of line judges in club livery, and the visual signature of a Wimbledon court was as much about those figures crouched at the back and sides as about the grass. That has gone. The club moved to electronic line calling across its courts, retiring the line judge from the Championships and leaving the chair umpire as the only official on court.
The change altered the look of every court on the site, the show courts and the outside courts alike. The corners are emptier. The calls arrive as a recorded voice through the court's audio rather than from a person, and on a small outside court where the crowd is close, that voice carries into the walkway in a way a shout never did. The challenge, and the small piece of theatre that went with it, has no purpose in a system that calls every ball automatically, so that has gone too.
It also removed an old distinction between the courts. Line judging quality was never uniform across eighteen courts, and the officials working a first-round match on Court 17 were not the ones working the men's final; a marginal call on an outside court was a slightly different proposition from a marginal call on Centre Court. An automated system is the same system everywhere, which is a real gain in consistency and a real loss in atmosphere, and reasonable people at the club take both views. The technology, its accuracy and what happens when it fails are covered in our guide to electronic line calling at Wimbledon.
Accessible viewing across the courts
Every show court has designated wheelchair spaces with a companion seat alongside, and they are allocated through a separate application route rather than the general ballot. The positions on Centre Court and No.1 Court are at the ends of the lower tiers, which gives a good, flat view down the length of the court and avoids the steep sections entirely.
The outside courts are a harder proposition, because unreserved standing at a railing is not a format that adapts well. Several of the larger outside courts have accessible positions, and the site's terracing means that step-free routes between courts are longer than the direct ones. Anyone planning a day around the outside courts should get the accessible route map in advance rather than working it out on the day; the application process and what is provided are set out in our guide to accessible tickets at Wimbledon.
Where to stand for the best free view
Some of the best viewing on the site costs nothing beyond the Grounds Pass.
The walkway above Court 12 gives a raised view over the court, and standing room there turns over reasonably fast. The bank at the top of the site sees everything on the big screen, which during a wet spell is the only tennis being played anywhere. And the gaps between the outside courts, where two courts back onto each other, occasionally give you a decent angle on both at once.
The one that people miss is the practice court viewing area in the morning, before the main draw starts. It is the least contested good view at Wimbledon, and it is available for an hour or so at the start of every day.
Two practical notes. Standing areas on the outside courts have stewards who will keep the walkways clear, so a spot at a railing is a spot you keep by staying in it. And nothing is reserved: the moment you leave to buy a drink, the space closes behind you.
How the site has changed, and what is proposed next
The Championships were played at Worple Road from 1877 until 1921, on a ground where the principal court really was in the centre of the site, which is where the name came from. The move to Church Road in 1922 gave the club room to build the Centre Court that still stands, and the site has been rebuilt in stages ever since — a new No.1 Court in 1997, a substantial development around 2009 that produced No.2 Court, Court 12, Court 18 and the Centre Court roof, No.3 Court shortly afterwards, and the No.1 Court roof in 2019.
Each of those rebuilds followed the same logic: more covered seats for the courts that matter most, and more permanent seating on the courts below them. The direction of travel has consistently been away from standing and towards seating, which improves comfort and reduces the number of people who can get near a court.
The club has since acquired the former Wimbledon Park golf course to its north and put forward a large expansion scheme for it, including additional courts and a further show court, with the stated aim of bringing qualifying onto the same site as the Championships. That proposal has been through a contested planning process and subsequent legal challenge, and it would be wrong for a guide like this one to state where it will end up. What can be said is that the club's long-term intent is a considerably larger site, and that the qualifying event currently held at Roehampton is the piece the plan is designed to absorb — the way that works at present is covered in our guide to Wimbledon qualifying.
Choosing a court for the day you have
The sensible way to pick is by what you want from the day rather than by prestige.
For atmosphere at close range in the first week, go for a Grounds Pass and spend the day on the outside courts. You will see more tennis, from closer, than any show court ticket delivers, and you will see players you have never heard of who will be seeded within two years.
For the certainty of watching one great match from a seat, you want a show court ticket, and No.2 Court is the underrated choice — a proper crowd, real matches and a fraction of the Centre Court ballot odds.
For the second week, the calculation inverts. The outside courts empty as the draws contract, the interesting tennis concentrates on the four show courts, and a Grounds Pass buys a big screen and a good deal of walking. The best day to attend guide works through that trade in detail, and the broader England sports guides hub covers the rest of the British grass-court summer.