THE CHAMPIONSHIPS, WIMBLEDON

The Championships, Wimbledon, are a fortnight of tennis on grass at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, in south-west London, beginning on the last Monday in June or the first in July and ending with the ladies’ final on the Saturday and the gentlemen’s on the Sunday. It is the oldest tennis tournament there is, and the only one of the four majors still played on grass.

It was first held to pay for a roller. The club’s pony roller had broken, the lawns needed it, and a tournament seemed the way to raise the money.

The Roller

The All England Croquet Club was founded in 1868 by six gentlemen at the offices of The Field, on four acres of meadow off Worple Road in Wimbledon. Croquet was going out of fashion, and in 1875 the club laid out a lawn for the new game of lawn tennis, which Major Wingfield had patented the year before under the name Sphairistikè.

In June 1877 the committee decided on a championship, for gentlemen only, to pay for mending the roller. Twenty-two men entered at a guinea each. Rain put the final back three days, to 19 July, and some two hundred people paid a shilling to watch Spencer Gore, a rackets player of twenty-seven, win it in forty-eight minutes. He was given twelve guineas and a silver cup presented by The Field. The tournament cleared ten pounds.

Until 1922 the champion sat out the tournament and played only the final, against whoever had come through to challenge him. That year the club moved to Church Road, driven there by the crowds that came to see Suzanne Lenglen, and built the present Centre Court.

No British man won the singles between Fred Perry in 1936 and Andy Murray in 2013.

Centre Court

It seats fifteen thousand and is played on for only the fortnight. The grass has been ryegrass alone since 2001.

Above the players’ entrance are two lines of Kipling: if you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.

The Royal Box is at the south end, seventy-four seats of green Lloyd Loom. Players bowed or curtsied to it on coming in and going out until 2003, and now do so only when the King or the Prince of Wales is in it.

The roof came in 2009, and with it play under lights, which the borough stops at eleven. Line judges were replaced by machines in 2025. The balls have been Slazenger’s since 1902, which is the oldest sponsorship in sport. The players wear white, almost entirely, under a rule first written down in 1963.

The public’s seats come three ways: a ballot, held since 1924 and oversubscribed several times over; the queue, which camps overnight for some five hundred seats on each show court; and debentures, sold every five years to pay for the buildings, each a seat for every day of five Championships and the only tickets that may be sold on.

Every champion is invited to join the club, which has three hundred and seventy-five members.

In 2026 Jannik Sinner won it for the second year running, and Linda Nosková, at twenty-one the youngest champion since 2011, beat Karolína Muchová in a final between two Czechs.

What to Know

It runs for a fortnight from the last Monday in June or the first in July. The grounds open at ten, the outside courts begin at eleven and Centre Court at half past one.

A lounge suit. In the Royal Box a tie is required, and women do not wear hats, so as not to block the view behind. Elsewhere the grounds ask nothing. Bring a coat.

A grounds ticket admits to the outside courts, where the seats are a few feet from the players, and can be had without a night in the queue.

Take the District line to Southfields and walk the ten minutes to the gates. Stay in London.

The mistake is to spend the first week on Centre Court. The outside courts hold the same players, closer, and the second week is when Centre Court is worth the seat.

The Court

The Championships are not the Court’s own. Debenture seats on Centre Court are sought on a member’s behalf, since those are the seats that may change hands, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in London, and the table afterward. The US Open follows at the end of August.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.