Smash Padel has secured planning approval for Bath’s first padel club after a host of well-documented refusals and complaints in the city — but despite this breakthrough, CEO Rupert Taylor says the sport “must do more” to demonstrate its benefits to local authorities and sceptical residents.
Last week, Bath & North East Somerset Council passed Smash Padel’s planning application for a five-court club on the site of an unused former railway junction in the Bathampton suburb, east of Bath — but the application succeeded by just a single vote.
Yet Smash Padel’s application for the Bathampton site had many persuasive features: metal-clad canopies to maintain the site’s railway heritage, 130m distance from its nearest residences, extensive community programmes (matching the demonstrably successful ones at their other six sites), and 190 letters of support recognising the local need for accessible sports facilities and the value of bringing a currently unused site back into community use.
As reported by The Padel Paper last November, Bath had become something of a hotbed for the media’s negative coverage of padel.
The Daily Mail reported that padel was ‘banned‘ in Bath after planning applications for facilities at Odd Down Sports Ground and Lansdown Tennis Club were rejected following widespread reports of residents’ complaints (with the inevitable ‘gunshot’ tropes to describe the noise).
Smash Padel CEO Taylor told The Padel Paper that, despite breaking the hoodoo of planning applications in Bath, the padel industry as a whole “has to work much harder” to demonstrate that the benefits the sport brings to communities outweigh concerns about noise disturbance, which tend to dominate the media’s coverage.
Taylor said: “The whole ‘Padel is banned’ story says more about the nature of our media landscape than it does about either Bath or padel. Unfortunately, our media is set up not to inform but entertain, which often means hysteria and scaremongering. That story was absurd.
“But having witnessed the process in the committee chamber, there was a lot of time given over to talking about sound. We weren’t even asked to do an acoustic report, but we did one anyway and still people were talking about noise, even though the report confirmed there was no cause for concern.
“There was zero discussion of the benefits that padel can bring in terms of improving sedentary lifestyles and engaging the community. It just wasn’t deemed to be relevant.
“The observation for padel is that even though our site is 130m from the nearest residents and even though we think we have a seriously powerful offering for the community, we still only just squeaked through by one vote.
“For me, that illustrates that padel has got a huge amount of work to do to demonstrate that it brings benefits that far outweigh these concerns. At the moment, the concerns are winning. We need to change that narrative.”
Smash Padel is of the UK’s leading operators in junior development, as well as running a host of innovative community programmes which target under-served demographics, such as Sofa 2 Smash which combats sedentary lifestyles.
Taylor believes that promoting the many positive outcomes of these kinds of programmes is what could shift the needle nationally when it comes to padel facility planning applications.
He said: “By its nature, the game of padel is inclusive, but operators aren’t being inclusive simply by putting up courts. Being inclusive means taking the game to the cohorts who will benefit from it most. Juniors, disabled people, sedentary people… delivering these programmes is hard, but they create amazing outcomes and ultimately can save taxpayers money.
“Demonstrating this is what’s going to shift the narrative. Padel has got to collectively emphasise these strengths.
“Padel clubs are staffed seven days a week and can create a whole week’s worth of positive outcomes for the community. It’s not a rugby or football pitch, which is only busy on a Saturday and Sunday morning.
“Our Bath success has motivated us to carry on showing councillors and potential objectors the wider benefits padel can bring. We want authorities to think, ‘Wow, how can we bring this to our community?’ That’s the only way we’re going to shift the emphasis away from noise complaints.”
