Padel, placemaking and the meanwhile dilemma
© David Lloyd Clubs
I may be slightly late to the game, but it’s time to confess that I’ve fallen fully into the fad that is padel. It might just be the fastest-growing sport in Britain and I say that as a fully signed-up member. Unable to resist the pull of this relatively new-to-the-UK sport, I found myself increasingly determined to give it a go.
Now that I spend most of my time working in Shoreditch, with a court conveniently close to the office, it felt inevitable. As someone who used to play tennis, padel seemed like the perfect Thursday evening activity, one that’s social, active and vaguely wholesome. What I didn’t anticipate, however, was the surprising number of steps required just to start playing and accessing the sport, there’s a series of hoops you need to jump through to gain entry.
Step one: Download an app
Step two: Find a class that isn’t during working hours and a court that isn’t an hour from my house or office
Step three: Get ranked, this involved finding another class outside of working hours near me
Step four: Once you’re ranked and ready, booking a game is actually relatively straightforward and then the addiction begins and the community builds
And that community is growing really quickly.
According to Oxygen Consulting, the number of UK padel courts has risen from fewer than 40 in 2016 to more than 700 today, representing a compound annual growth rate of 43%. Court occupancy is averaging above 85%, with some venues operating until 1am. Half of players report difficulty booking courts, due to supply having to catch up with demand.
For developers, that demand is just as addictive as the sport itself. Padel courts offer something incredibly attractive to landowners and regeneration teams - a fast, relatively low-cost way to activate vacant land. Empty plots suddenly become destinations. Dead space gets footfall. A fenced-off site becomes somewhere people actually want to spend time.
But the more successful these meanwhile sports spaces become, the more complicated they are to remove.
That is the contradiction at the centre of the UK’s padel boom.
Sport as placemaking
For years, developers have relied on coffee shops, food halls and pop-up retail to activate regeneration areas. Increasingly, sport is becoming part of that toolkit.
Padel sits perfectly between health and competitive socialising. It’s easier to pick up than tennis, inherently social because it’s doubles-based and appeals to a generation that wants experiences as much as exercise. Unlike many traditional sports clubs, the atmosphere feels casual, networked and low-pressure. You don’t have to identify as sporty to play.
That matters because successful meanwhile uses are not just about filling space. They’re about creating habits.
The strongest temporary places become part of people’s routines. Weekly games become social anchors, WhatsApp groups form, post-match drinks become rituals. Entire communities emerge from what was initially supposed to be temporary infrastructure.
This is exactly what happened with five-a-side football in London. Places such as the Shoreditch Powerleague site transformed disused urban land into a vital social hub. What started as interim activation became deeply embedded into the identity of the area.
Padel is now following the same trajectory, only faster.
Unlocking empty land
One of the reasons padel has spread so rapidly is because the courts themselves are relatively easy to install. Modular systems can be dropped into vacant development sites, rooftops, underused car parks, retail parks, railway arches and industrial estates.
In Paris, temporary FlexiPadel courts have been used to activate urban spaces with reversible installations that can be assembled and dismantled quickly. In New York, meanwhile courts have been used as event-led leisure infrastructure, often tied to wider lifestyle or real estate branding exercises.
In theory, this is a win-win. Developers generate interim revenue and footfall while waiting for planning or financing, while local people gain access to leisure infrastructure that may otherwise never have existed.
In practice though, things become more complicated once the community starts to stick.
What happens when meanwhile becomes meaningful?
The challenge with successful meanwhile uses is that they stop feeling temporary.
Once people have built routines and relationships around a place, removing it starts to feel less like redevelopment and more like displacement.
This is where the tension around sports-led activation becomes particularly interesting. Unlike a pop-up retail unit, sport creates repetition. You come back every week. You play with the same people. You begin to associate an area with a specific activity and community.
In Shoreditch, the conversation around sports meanwhile use already exists. The football pitches and newer padel facilities around major regeneration sites have become genuine community infrastructure. Yet many still sit on land earmarked for long-term development.
This raises the difficult question for developers and planners that if a meanwhile use site demonstrably improves wellbeing, social connection and place identity, should it still be considered temporary?
The better the meanwhile use works, the harder it becomes to justify removing it.
The accessibility question
There is another side to the argument around accessibility.
Padel markets itself as accessible and compared with tennis it often is. The learning curve is shorter, games are social from the outset and it attracts a broader demographic mix.
But accessibility is not just about whether someone can physically play the sport. It’s also about affordability, geography and availability.
At the moment, 72% of UK padel courts are concentrated in southern England. Many venues operate through private booking systems and peak slots can be expensive. The sport’s growth has also been driven heavily by premium operators such as David Lloyd, Rocket Padel and Slazenger Padel Clubs, all of which position padel within a broader lifestyle and wellness offer.
That creates an uncomfortable tension. Is padel genuinely democratic community infrastructure, or is it another form of experience-led urbanism primarily serving affluent young professionals?
In Barcelona and Madrid, where padel is deeply embedded into everyday culture, the sport feels more socially integrated. Courts are widespread, participation is normalised and padel operates more like standard public leisure infrastructure. In the UK, however, the sport still carries a sense of exclusivity and scarcity.
The planning backlash
There are also practical tensions emerging as the sport scales. Padel courts are noisy.
The enclosed glass walls, repetitive impacts, floodlights and evening socialising have already generated planning disputes across the UK. Concerns around noise pollution and anti-social behaviour are becoming increasingly common in residential areas, particularly as operators extend playing hours late into the evening.
At the same time, rising land values create pressure to maximise development potential. From a commercial perspective, low-density leisure use on prime urban land can become difficult to justify permanently.
And this is the central challenge for meanwhile sports infrastructure. If it remains genuinely temporary, communities risk losing valuable social spaces and if it becomes effectively permanent, landowners may become less willing to offer sites for interim use in the first place.
The success of meanwhile use can paradoxically undermine the model itself.
Beyond padel
What padel really reveals is a much broader shift in how cities think about placemaking.
Sport is no longer just recreation. It is increasingly being used as social infrastructure in regeneration strategies and considered an activation tool, a branding mechanism and a community-building device.
And unlike many forms of temporary urbanism, sport creates emotional attachment very quickly.
The question for cities is not whether these meanwhile uses create value. Clearly they do. The question is how we deal with that value once communities begin to depend on it.
Because once a temporary padel court becomes the place where your friendships happen every Thursday night, it stops feeling temporary altogether.
