Everybody Leisure Padel Roll Out

Everybody Leisure wanted padel across its estate, not at a single flagship. They didn't need one building designed. They needed a partner who could take a repeatable court product into several existing leisure sites and get each one consented, built and trading without starting from scratch every time. We came in as that strategic partner, setting the template at the first site and adapting it to each of the others.

A leisure operator with several centres already owns the hardest things to find: land, parking, footfall and a membership base. Padel lets them get more out of all four. Designing the programme as a whole means the court layout, fencing, lighting and drainage details are settled once and then reused. The work at each site is about what's actually different there: levels, neighbours, access and how the courts link back to the main centre.

We decided this site by site. A canopy extends the season, protects bookings from Cheshire rain and makes courts easier to programme for coaching and leagues. It also adds cost, height and a bigger planning conversation, especially near homes. Where the numbers and the neighbours supported it, we covered the courts. Where they didn't, open-air courts got the site trading sooner and left room to add a canopy later.

The main job was fitting courts onto live leisure sites without disrupting the centres around them. That meant placing them where players could reach them from the existing reception and changing rooms, keeping floodlight spill and noise away from neighbouring homes, and handling surface water on large new hard-standing areas. Each site also needed a planning case that presented padel as good for community sport rather than as an intrusion.

Each of the three sites, Congleton, Altrincham and Crewe, has two to three courts, with a mix of canopied and open-air courts to suit the site and the budget. Congleton opened first, in early December.