The Hurlingham Club

Frank Heathcote founded the club on the Hurlingham estate in 1869 to promote live pigeon shooting, and in 1874 it bought the freehold for £27,500. It published the rules of polo in 1873, staged its first match the following year and was the headquarters of British polo until its polo grounds were compulsorily purchased for housing after the Second World War. The house at its centre, built in 1760 and enlarged in the 1790s, is listed Grade II*.

Lawn tennis began here in 1877, the year of the first Wimbledon, and a lawn racquet ground followed in the 1880s. In 1946 the club held the first International Lawn Tennis Club reception on the eve of the Championships. Since 1994 it has staged an exhibition on its grass courts in the week before Wimbledon, played by Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray and Carlos Alcaraz among others, and known since 2022 as the Giorgio Armani Tennis Classic.

In 2002 and again in 2009 the club’s grounds manager put its grass courts at thirty, laid on riverside fields levelled about a century earlier, alongside croquet lawns, bowling greens and a cricket square. Hurlingham is the grass court as part of a private estate: forty-two acres of lawns and gardens kept within reach of central London.