Padel venue — business case

Summary

This is a first proper look at whether opening an independent padel venue around Brighton and Mid Sussex stacks up: the demand, the competition, what it costs to build and run, how it could be financed, what the risks are, and what to do next without spending real money.

The version modelled throughout is a six-court indoor venue (four doubles, two singles) with a licensed bar, kitchen and some outdoor space — a social venue rather than a pay-and-play facility. That’s one of three formats considered in Section 5, used as the working model so the numbers are concrete.

What the research found:

• Local demand is strong, measurable, and currently capped by supply. The council’s courts at Hove Beach Park have run at 97% occupancy since March 2025; the council says publicly that demand “far exceeds supply in the city”; sampled peak days at the nearest large indoor venue show zero available slots. Working backwards from occupancy, roughly 9,500–11,000 people already play regularly within the catchment — about three times the national participation rate — and they are playing as much as the courts allow, not as much as they want.
• The UK market is early. GB passed one million players in May 2026 after participation doubled in 2025, yet has roughly one court per 37,000 people against Spain’s one per 3,100. Demand per court has nearly doubled since 2019 even as court numbers grew 36-fold — capacity is being absorbed as fast as it is built.
• There’s a clear gap in the offer. Nearly all local supply is courts in industrial units with minimal hospitality. The best-performing venues locally and in London are the ones with food, drink and social programming — and no venue in the catchment occupies that position yet, though one competitor is building towards it.
• The economics work at moderate utilisation. Base case: ~£990k revenue and ~£350k EBITDA on ~£950k invested. Break-even including debt service sits at roughly 50–55% court utilisation, against observed local utilisation of 85–97%. Filling the venue needs ~1,290 regular players — about 12–14% of the people already playing locally, before any growth.

The two hard parts — neither fatal, both shape the plan:

1. Financing. A single bank loan for ~£950k does not exist for a new company with no trading history or leisure background — so the real question is how to answer that gap, and Section 8 lays out four routes rather than one plan: (A) assemble a full stack now (founder capital, Start Up Loans, asset finance on the courts, landlord contribution, a £250–350k EIS equity round with precedents at exactly this size); (B) bring in institutional capital — the British Business Bank’s brand-new South East Investment Fund (loans £25k–£2m, equity to £5m), the leisure funds already invested in padel as anchor investors, or landlord “build-to-suit” capital via the lease; (C) build a small £250–450k version first at an existing sports club, trade 12–18 months, and finance the full venue off real accounts; (D) franchise first to borrow someone else’s credibility and playbook; or (E) structure as a not-for-profit and unlock the LTA loans that have built 100+ padel courts — the cheapest money in the sector, at the price of an asset lock (salaries yes, equity upside no). The current lean: price A and B together during validation, hold C as a genuine fallback, take D only if the experience gap matters more than the concept, and decide on E explicitly — it’s a fork in what we’re building, not a financing tactic.
2. Timing. A premium six-court indoor venue with a high-end bar is under construction in Shoreham right now, opening autumn 2026, with two further multi-court venues in the local planning pipeline. The response is set out in Section 6 — different corridor, lower price point, membership-led — but the practical consequence is a clock: this position supports a limited number of venues and the pipeline suggests it fills within 12–18 months.

Where this lands: the case supports proceeding — but only as far as a four-week validation phase (site search, lender conversations, competitor visits) costing £5–10k, run against pre-agreed stop criteria (Section 12). If validation holds, the commit decision lands in about three months, ahead of the window closing.

2Why padel, why now

Padel is the fastest-growing sport in Britain, and the growth is compounding rather than spiking:

Source: LTA, the governing body for padel in Great Britain.

The bottom row is the one that matters for a would-be operator: court numbers grew 36-fold in seven years and demand per court still nearly doubled. A doubles court running a realistic booking day saturates at roughly 250–300 regular players; the national average of ~550 past-year players per court is why peak slots sell out in minutes and why observed occupancy at good venues runs 85%+. New capacity is being absorbed as fast as it is built.

• Participation more than doubled in 2025 (+115%). The LTA’s target of 1,000 courts by end-2026 was reached in July 2025, a year early.
• Playtomic’s 2026 Global Padel Report classifies the UK as a “Hotspot” market: demand consistently outpacing supply, ~85% average court occupancy, and roughly half of UK players reporting difficulty booking peak slots.
• Retention distinguishes a sport from a craze: 92% of first-time players return, UK play frequency has held steady at ~4 sessions per month throughout the boom, and two-thirds of GB padel players also play tennis — the sport recruits from an established base.
• The sport is structurally social: doubles by default, 90-minute sessions, playable across mixed abilities, with tournament formats (Americano) designed around rotating partners. These mechanics drive food and beverage spend directly.

3Local market

Current supply within ~20 minutes of the Brighton–Burgess Hill corridor

Approximately 33 courts serve a catchment of roughly 450,000 people (Brighton & Hove 284k, Mid Sussex 155k, plus the Adur/Worthing/Lewes fringes): about one court per 13,500 people.

Evidence of unmet demand

• Hove Beach Park: 97% average weekly occupancy across 392 bookable court-hours per week, sustained over six months. The council’s user survey found court availability to be the single biggest barrier to playing more.
• Withdean’s single pop-up court ran at ~90% occupancy, prompting the council to build three permanent covered courts this year.
• PADELHUB Crawley and Atmos Worthing showed zero available Playtomic slots on days sampled in August 2026.
• The commercial agent on the Shoreham scheme describes indoor supply around Brighton as constrained by the lack of suitable buildings rather than by demand.

Where the binding constraint is building stock, incumbents cannot respond quickly to demand. That is a favourable structure for a new entrant able to secure a suitable site (Section 10).

Pipeline

If the full pipeline completes, the catchment reaches ~63 courts by end-2027 — one per ~7,100 people, still two to three times below current Spanish or Swedish provision. The relevant question is whether the catchment can absorb the pipeline plus one further venue. Sections 4 and 6 address this from the demand and competitive sides respectively.

4Market sizing

Three questions, answered in order: how many people play here today, how many the venue needs, and what happens when the full pipeline of new courts lands.

How many people play in the catchment today

The naive method — applying national participation rates (~0.7% of the population playing regularly) to a 450k catchment — gives ~3,100 regular players. The revealed local demand says that materially understates reality:

• The catchment’s ~30 courts observably run at 70–95% occupancy (Hove Beach Park 97%; Withdean ~90%; zero sampled availability at the two big Playtomic venues).
• 30 courts × ~15 bookable hours/day × ~70–80% blended utilisation ≈ 9,500–11,000 court-hours per month. Doubles puts four players on a court, so that is roughly 38,000–44,000 player-sessions per month.
• At the UK-typical 4 sessions per player per month: ~9,500–11,000 people already playing regularly in the catchment — around 2.4% of the population, three times the national rate, in a market where the council’s own survey says availability is the main barrier to playing more.

That is consistent with the catchment profile — affluent (Mid Sussex median salary £37.7k), young (Brighton median age 37.9), and early to the sport — and it means today’s player base is a floor, capped by supply rather than interest.

How many players the venue needs

Working back from the base case (Section 7):

• 4 doubles courts × 15 hours/day × 60% utilisation, plus 2 singles courts at 45% ≈ 5,150 player-sessions per month
• At 4 sessions per player per month: ~1,290 regular players using the venue as their main club
• Against ~9,500–11,000 people already playing locally: a required share of 12–14% of current active players, assuming zero growth.

What happens when the pipeline lands

The real test is end-2027: ~68 courts in the catchment (current stock, full pipeline including the approved Consort Way, Q Leisure and Eixo schemes, plus this venue). Total capacity at that point is ~31,000 court-hours per month. What average utilisation each scenario produces:

Read against the venue’s break-even of 50–55% utilisation (Section 7): the growth scenario clears comfortably, but with the pipeline now fully approved the middle scenario sits right at break-even on raw averages — meaning in a moderate-growth world, differentiation decides who wins, not the rising tide. That is the strongest quantitative argument in this document for the social-venue format over another pay-and-play box, and it hardens the stop criteria: if the pipeline grows again before a lease is signed, the maths must be rerun. National participation grew 115% last year; the middle row assumes it slows by half, twice.

The metric to watch is local players per court. Above ~200, courts stay full regardless of operator; below ~120, differentiation decides who wins; a sustained slide towards ~80 is the Swedish signal and triggers the stop criteria in Section 12.

Singles courts

A padel singles court measures 20m × 6m against 20m × 10m for doubles, so it fits floor-space a doubles court cannot use. Within 20 miles there is one bookable outdoor singles court (Eixo) and one indoor (Eastbourne). Singles serves two-player groups, lunchtime sessions and coaching; two singles courts cost roughly one doubles court to build and improve the layout efficiency of an irregular unit. The downside is limited and the differentiation is real.

5Format options

Three realistic formats:

Where this lands. Option B is preferred on the evidence rather than on taste: the one local venue with a bar and tournament programme is the busiest in the catchment; the two strongest recent London openings (Padel Social Club, Padium) are hospitality-led with waitlisted memberships; and the hospitality layer is the part competitors can’t retrofit into a shed (no space, no licence, no kitchen). It’s also the part of the plan to test hardest during validation — if lender and landlord conversations won’t support the extra capex, Option C stays open.

Option B in outline:

• Four indoor doubles and two indoor singles courts, competition-spec, adequate clear height, climate-controlled. Large enough to sustain leagues and a social calendar; small enough to retain a club feel.
• A licensed bar and kitchen with courtside sightlines, so waiting and spectating drive dwell time and spend.
• Outdoor terrace and a planted indoor social space for the winter months — the cheapest single intervention that separates the venue from a sports centre.
• Membership at ~£30–35/month: extended booking window, discounted rates, leagues, member events, guest passes. Local benchmark: PADELHUB charges £35–45/month; Padel Social Club’s £60/month London tier sold out. No venue in the catchment has built a membership with genuine club value.
• Programming: weekly Americanos, box leagues, a coaching academy, corporate events (£30–60/head is the prevailing UK rate). Programmed hours fill off-peak capacity and feed bar revenue.
• Tone: informal and accessible — a country-club standard of comfort without members’-club exclusivity.

6Competitive analysis

Current rivalry is low; rivalry within 18 months will be real. At 90–97% occupancy, today’s venues share a queue rather than compete. By end-2027 the catchment could hold nearly 60 courts. If participation continues on anything near its current trajectory, demand outruns even that supply; nonetheless, entry is visible (planning applications are public) and further entrants should be assumed.

The entrant that matters most is Club Padel, Shoreham (autumn 2026): premium indoor, high-end bar, founder memberships — the closest existing project to Option B. Three considerations:

1. Geography. Shoreham serves the coastal strip west of Brighton. A site in the Burgess Hill–Hassocks–A23 corridor serves the Mid Sussex commuter towns and north Brighton — a different 20-minute drive-time map containing only Eixo and PADELHUB.
2. Price. Club Padel has set its list price at £50–60/hour. A position at £36–44 peak — comparable experience, mid-market price, membership-led — is open and defensible.
3. Information value. A well-funded operator committing seven figures to the same thesis in the same catchment is strong external validation, and its occupancy and membership data will be publicly observable within months of opening — before this project reaches the point of committed capital.

Substitutes. Gyms, five-a-side, tennis and other leisure spend. Padel is currently taking share from these, and 92% first-session retention indicates it holds what it takes. The most credible substitute threat is padel inside existing clubs: David Lloyd — the UK’s largest padel operator — now runs three courts at its Wickwoods country club in Albourne, in the heart of the corridor. But Wickwoods is an adults-only members’ club at £100+/month: padel as a perk inside a gym membership. An open, bookable social venue does a different job, and Wickwoods operating profitably in the belt is evidence the country-club setting works here rather than a door closing.

Supplier power. Court manufacturers and installers are numerous, which supports both capex negotiation and asset-finance terms. The supplier with genuine leverage is Playtomic (~80% of UK booking-platform share), whose commission is unpublished and which owns the customer relationship. Mitigation is covered in Section 11.

Buyer power. Players are currently availability-first. As supply catches up, price sensitivity will rise for undifferentiated court time; it rises far less for a venue with membership and community attached. This asymmetry is the core of the strategy.

Durable advantages available to this project: the licensed premises, kitchen and outdoor space (planning consent, licence and capex a competitor cannot cheaply replicate); the membership base (accumulates and does not transfer); site control (7m+ clear-height buildings near Brighton are the market’s acknowledged constraint, so a secured building is itself a barrier); and programming density (the venue running the leagues holds the players).

On timing. We wouldn’t be first to this position, and don’t need to be — but it supports a limited number of venues, and the local pipeline suggests it gets filled within 12–18 months. That argues for running the validation phase now and reaching a decision within three months.

7Financial overview

All figures are pre-diligence estimates from operator benchmarks, supplier pricing and published local rates; the validation phase firms them up. VAT is excluded throughout.

Capital costs — ~£950k total requirement (base)

Range across realistic sites: £700k to £1.2m depending on the building. For calibration: 4-court outdoor clubs run £250–450k all-in; Padium’s 8-court flagship cost ~£5m; a 13-court centre in Farnham cost £2.75m. This project sits deliberately mid-market.

One route changes this table’s shape rather than its scale: building our own hall on a town-edge plot (Section 10) replaces the fit-out budget with roughly £1.6–2.8m including land — but removes the rent line from operating costs and turns the largest cost into a freehold a lender can secure against. If that route survives its first supplier quotes, the Section 8 financing routes get re-run with a commercial mortgage in the stack.

Revenue — three scenarios (steady state, year 2)

Assumptions: 15 bookable hours/day, 363 days/year. Doubles blended £26–36/hour across peak and off-peak; singles £20–24/hour; membership ~£30–35/month. Local price ceiling: £60/hour (PADELHUB peak; Club Padel list price).

Non-court revenue is 30% of the base case — the top of the 20–35% band achieved by well-run clubs, which is the purpose of the format. (Standard pay-and-play venues typically run food and beverage at 4–7% of revenue.)

Deliberately excluded from the model as upside: sponsorship. Established clubs get up to ~10% of revenue from sponsorship and brand partnerships (court naming, kit and equipment deals, local businesses backing leagues — Rocket Padel runs an EA7/Armani tie-up at the national scale), and the pre-opening version matters for financing too: founding sponsors and court naming rights are cash that arrives before the doors open, sold against exactly the demand data in this document.

Operating costs (base)

Profitability

The conservative column is the one to take seriously: at 45% utilisation the venue is EBITDA-positive but can’t service its debt. Two facts sit either side of it. Every observed local comparable runs at 85–97% — roughly double the conservative assumption. And the ancillary layer is the margin of safety: a pay-and-play venue at 45% utilisation has no other engine, whereas this format still has membership, bar and events revenue. Break-even including debt service lands at roughly 50–55% utilisation — the number both we and any lender will focus on.

Unit economics

An indoor doubles court-hour costs roughly £11–13 to provide (rent, rates, utilities, staff share, maintenance) and sells for £26–36. Each booked hour brings ~2.4 people past the bar on average. Court hire drives margin; hospitality drives retention; membership drives predictability. The operating design connects the three.

8Financing — the biggest bottleneck

The constraint, briefly

No UK padel venue in the £500k–£2m range that we found was funded mainly by unsecured bank debt. Unsecured lenders underwrite against filed accounts: Funding Circle excludes businesses under a year old, iwoca caps new companies around £10k, Starling wants trading businesses plus personal guarantees, and the high-street banks cap unsecured lending at £25k–£100k against track records a new company doesn’t have. Projected revenue, however well-evidenced, isn’t collateral. The gap in our case is exactly that — no trading history and no leisure background — so the routes below differ mainly in how they answer that gap: assemble around it, borrow someone’s credibility, or go and earn the track record first.

Five real routes, for discussion. They aren’t all mutually exclusive — and the validation phase can test the first two in the same set of conversations.

The routes side by side

Where we currently lean, for discussion: run A and B together through validation — the same conversations (brokers, agents, the SEIF, a first angel coffee) price both within four weeks. Hold C as the genuine fallback rather than a consolation: it’s the only commercial route that fully solves the credibility problem, and if the raise stalls it becomes the plan rather than the failure. D earns its place because it attacks the experience gap most directly, but it costs the concept — worth choosing only if we decide experience matters more than the position. E is not a fallback but a fork in what we’re building: it carries the strongest financing package of the five, paid for entirely in upside — the right answer if what we want is the club and a good living from it, the wrong one if any of us is counting on an exit. That deserves an explicit decision among us, not a default.

Also looked at and set aside: a commercial mortgage ( freehold-only, needs trading history) and a council concession like Hove Beach Park (the channel exists but is currently occupied, and costs the licence and the format).

Supporting detail: why some equity belongs in routes A and B

The debt-first instinct is right for a cash-generative asset business — but the first ~£300k of risk (planning, licensing and the build, all pre-revenue) is venture risk that debt providers simply won’t price. Equity absorbs the risk debt refuses; debt finances the asset-backed layer it’s good at. An EIS-qualifying round — 30% income-tax relief to investors, which meaningfully improves the terms we can ask for — covering 25–35% of the company is how this gets solved at this scale.

Precedents: Social Sports Society raised £307k on Crowdcube against a £250k target; The Padel Hub raised ~£163k on Crowdcube alongside £1.24m elsewhere in the round; Court de Padel has raised £641k across two Crowdcube rounds from a single open club; Smash Padel raised ~£537k at a £5.8m pre-money valuation; The Padel Club’s expansion round included EIS investment from Endeavour Ventures. Crowdfunding has an additional property relevant to a membership venue: two hundred local investors are two hundred founding members.

Supporting detail: grants and public money

For a company limited by shares, the realistic grant expectation is zero. Sport England’s Movement Fund excludes for-profits explicitly; the LTA’s loan schemes fund not-for-profits only (which is exactly what makes Route E interesting); the government’s £3m for covered padel facilities in 2026/27 is routed through the LTA towards roughly three community projects nationally, with no application route yet published; and the post-UKSPF local funds are directed at deprived areas outside the South East.

What a for-profit does get is tax-side and worth six figures:

• Full expensing and the Annual Investment Allowance: 100% first-year relief on plant and machinery — LED lighting, electrical systems, HVAC, kitchen and bar equipment, systems. The court structures themselves occupy an unsettled position between “plant” and “premises”; a capital-allowances specialist’s opinion before the build is warranted, as the classification moves six figures of relief.
• Permanently lower retail/hospitality/leisure rates multipliers from April 2026, plus improvement relief on qualifying works to occupied premises.
• Council concessions: Brighton & Hove has twice granted council land to a padel operator (Hove Beach Park, Withdean) in exchange for community pricing — a channel that exists, currently occupied by Game4Padel.

(Longer-range: the new Sussex & Brighton Mayoral Combined Authority controls a £1.14bn 30-year investment fund from 2028 — one to monitor, not to wait for.)

Supporting detail: investors active in UK padel

The investor base for this sector is established and identifiable:

• Individuals (verified): Andy and Jamie Murray, Andrew Castle, Annabel Croft, Virgil van Dijk, Jamie Vardy, Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Tammy Abraham, Callum Wilson and Marcus Tavernier all hold Game4Padel stakes (most recent round at a £27m valuation). Stormzy backs Padel Social Club and increased his stake in its May 2026 £5.5m round. Spotify co-founder Martin Lorentzon is the principal backer of Padium. Savills reports professional footballers commissioning venue feasibility studies — athlete capital is actively seeking venue deals.
• Funds: Active Partners and Clark Group (Padel Social Club), Endeavour Ventures (EIS, The Padel Club), PXN/NPIF II (British Business Bank), Dwellcourt Group (PadelStars), Frasers Group (Slazenger Padel Clubs).
• Local: South East Angels is a Brighton-based angel network; the University of Sussex Business Angels programme operates through Sussex Innovation. No dedicated UK sports-and-leisure angel syndicate exists — generalist networks are doing these deals.
• EIS note: padel operators demonstrably secure EIS investment, but leisure trades can face qualification questions; advance assurance (in the validation plan) should precede any approach so the 30% relief is bankable in the offer.

9Independent, franchise or partnership?

The recommendation is independent, with the expertise bought in. Since this is the first question anyone asks, the reasoning in full:

The case for franchising. Brand, build expertise, booking technology, and some lender comfort. Game4Padel franchises (~£100k liquid capital required, franchisee brings the site), Major Padel Club from ~£70k, and Vida Del Padel is expanding. Banks genuinely do favour established franchise systems.

Why it doesn’t fit here. The lender uplift applies to proven systems with years of franchisee accounts, and UK padel franchising is roughly two years old. Discovery in padel runs through Playtomic and local occupancy is 90%+ regardless of operator, so a franchisor’s brand adds least in precisely this market. The royalty comes permanently out of the margin needed for debt service. And most decisively: the available franchise formats are the pay-and-play model — Option A — which this plan specifically argues against. (Game4Padel operating Brighton’s council courts would complicate a local franchise anyway.)

What franchising really offers — credibility — can be assembled directly:

• a court supplier/installer with an extensive UK track record (bringing feasibility, specification, and typically the asset-finance introduction);
• an experienced padel general manager or head coach as an early hire, potentially with equity — the answer to “who is operating this?” from lenders, landlords and planners;
• an asset-finance broker whose business is presenting exactly this package to credit committees;
• LTA venue registration (safeguarding standards, accredited coaches, sanctioned competition, buying-group discounts on lighting and utilities).

Partnership models (an operator builds and runs courts on a landowner’s site for a revenue share — Game4Padel’s other model, Padel United’s landowner programme) are designed for landowners seeking passive income. They answer a different question and are noted only for completeness.

10Property and planning

Location

Target: the A23/A27 corridor, outside the South Downs National Park. Priority zones in order:

1. Burgess Hill / Hassocks / Hickstead corridor — the centre of the Mid Sussex catchment, 15 minutes from north Brighton, industrial rents ~£7–12/sq ft, and a planning authority with a strong padel approval record (Consort Way, Albourne, Cuckfield, Goddards Green all approved; one refusal, at a Haywards Heath social club). The gap between Eixo and PADELHUB sits here — though the approved four-court Consort Way venue with its café (Section 3) will contest the town-centre end of it, which sharpens the case for the fuller social format rather than weakening the location.
2. Brighton fringe industrial (Hollingbury, Moulsecoomb, Portslade) — closest to the densest demand; tightest stock and highest rents (~£11/sq ft).
3. Shoreham/Lancing (~£7/sq ft) — the cheapest large units, but directly adjacent to Club Padel; justified only by a clearly superior building.

The South Downs idea, reluctantly, doesn’t survive the planning reality. Pyecombe and the surrounding countryside sit inside the National Park, where the SDNPA is the planning authority. National policy gives park landscape “great weight”, blocks major development except in exceptional circumstances, and asks whether the need could be met outside the park — which it obviously could. The park is also an International Dark Sky Reserve, which makes external lighting a battle in itself. The good news: the setting the concept wants — Downs views, trees, a garden — is achievable on the park’s edge without any of that.

The country-club route — a real alternative to the shed

The countryside strip just north of the Downs but outside the park boundary — the Low Weald belt through Albourne, Hurstpierpoint, Henfield, Twineham, Bolney and the Plumpton fringe — has Downs views, stays within 15 minutes of both Brighton and Burgess Hill, and is demonstrably approving padel. Recent decisions there give a clear formula for what wins and what loses:

So the rural entry ticket is: an existing leisure site or existing building, courts fully enclosed, a noise assessment submitted up front, and a diversification story. Named opportunities that fit:

• Mid Sussex Golf Club — the standout opening. They want padel (they applied and lost), they have land, a clubhouse, bar, restaurant and Downs views, and the refusal was about the format, not the principle. A revised indoor scheme, brought with a capitalised partner, addresses exactly what the officers objected to.
• Singing Hills Golf Centre, Albourne — family-owned 27 holes with a covered floodlit range, public restaurant, weddings and a big car park; no padel and no announced plans. Existing three-phase power and catering infrastructure de-risk two of the rural route’s costs.
• Hickstead — the biggest rural leisure landholder in the belt, on the A23, actively diversifying into weddings and corporate events, with a heavily seasonal calendar that leaves year-round capacity unused.
• Mannings Heath Golf & Wine Estate — golf plus vineyard plus restaurant; the closest existing brand to the concept’s tone.
• Farm buildings and equestrian arenas — redundant grain stores are tall enough for courts (the trade press now covers padel as a standard farm diversification, and installers offer landowner revenue-share builds); an indoor riding arena is ~60m × 25m of clear-span rural building. None is openly marketed in the belt right now, so this runs through the rural agents (HJ Burt in Steyning, Batcheller Monkhouse, Churchill Country & Equestrian).

Trade-offs against the industrial unit, honestly: planning is slower and less certain than a change of use on employment land; rural three-phase power can cost real money on a bare site (another reason golf clubs, with kitchens and floodlit ranges, appeal); a countryside location thins the 20-minute catchment and makes the venue drive-only, which matters for a bar. And the belt is no longer empty — David Lloyd Wickwoods, Q Leisure and Plumpton bracket it. What remains genuinely open is the western side (Henfield–Partridge Green–Cowfold–Twineham) and the format itself: nobody in the belt operates an open, bookable social club — the country-club venues are members-only and the approved schemes are courts-plus-café.

How this track fits the wider search is set out at the end of this section, after the third route.

Building requirements

• A padel court is 20m × 10m; indoor play needs 7–8m clear height (LTA minimum 6m, recommended 8m). Standard industrial eaves run 6–8m, so genuinely suitable units are scarce — the market’s main constraint, and a barrier in this plan’s favour once a building is secured.
• Four doubles, two singles and the hospitality space require roughly 1,400–1,600 m² (15–17,000 sq ft): £110–170k/year at corridor rents.
• Change of use from industrial (B2/B8) to indoor sport (Class E(d)) requires planning permission. Indoor schemes avoid the noise objections currently defeating outdoor padel applications nationally (Harrogate refused despite 4m acoustic barriers; Bath refusing applications broadly; Withdean operating under a noise abatement order; Guildford refused courts calling padel noise “above and beyond” other sports). An enclosed building is a materially easier application than floodlit outdoor courts near housing. This plan commits to fully enclosed courts only — no canopies. Canopy-covered courts are the corridor’s default because they’re cheap, but they leak noise, play badly in winter wind, and are the format drawing neighbour objections in Hove right now; the fully enclosed hall is both the better product and the safer application. Pre-application advice first; the objection to prepare for is loss of employment land, answered by the jobs the format creates on site.
• Licensing: premises licence from the district council (£100–635 application fee by rateable value, 28-day consultation, realistically 6–10 weeks); one founder obtains a personal licence (~£200 including the course); standard conditions (Challenge 25, CCTV, hours). Food business registration is free and due 28 days before opening. Straightforward, but it must be sequenced into the build programme.
• Indicative timeline from keys to opening: 6–9 months (planning 2–3 months; court lead times 2–3 months; fit-out in parallel).

Buildings actually on the market (August 2026)

A sweep of live listings confirms the corridor logic — the coastal Brighton–Shoreham strip is tight (one agent reports 850,000 sq ft of logged occupier demand against “very little available”), while Burgess Hill has both the supply and the tall buildings:

Two further notes from the sweep: essentially nothing over 5,000 sq ft is currently marketed in the Hassocks–Hickstead–Henfield belt, so that part of the corridor means new-build or a host-club deal; and rents confirm the model’s assumptions (£6.75–£13/sq ft across candidates against £8–10 modelled). Listings move — this table is a snapshot for the agent conversations, not a shortlist decision.

Building it ourselves — a hall on the town edge

The third route to a building is to stop hunting for one and build it: a plot on the edge of a Mid Sussex town, and a purpose-built six-court hall on it. This route exists because the two location ideals in this document — the countryside setting and a venue at the centre of players’ weekly routine — actually meet on the town edge. A venue people can roll to in ten or twenty unhurried minutes — and roll home from after a couple of pints — becomes part of the week rather than an outing, which is what fills the Monday-to-Thursday evenings where break-even lives; Brighton’s bikeable courts running at 90–97% occupancy is the strongest revealed demand in the catchment. And the first mile of countryside past the last house is where the views start — the Low Weald opening south towards the Downs escarpment. The brief: a plot within an easy, flat, ten-to-twenty-minute ride of the town it serves, outside the National Park and the High Weald National Landscape, with an open outlook.

Be honest about whose ride that is. A town-edge plot is bikeable for that town — Burgess Hill’s ~40,000 people or Haywards Heath’s ~35,000 — and a fifteen-minute drive for everyone else, Brighton included. It is not bikeable from Hove, and no buildable plot is: the hills close off the city’s northern fringe for a casual ride, and the National Park closes off everything beyond them. From Hove, the genuinely flat casual ride runs west along the coast to Portslade and Fishersgate — which is lease-and-convert territory (the Ellen Street unit above), not build territory. Worth noticing on the same map: Club Padel’s Shoreham site sits on that flat coastal ride, about twenty-five minutes from Hove, so the Brighton casual-ride catchment is about to be contested — and Portslade is the position that contests it from closer in. The two meanings of “bikeable” therefore point at two different tracks: Brighton-bikeable sharpens the Portslade end of the industrial search, town-bikeable is what this build route delivers, and choosing between them is really choosing whose weekly routine the venue sits in.

A kit hall roughly halves the price of a real building. A conventional UK design-and-build for a ~1,900 m² sports building prices at £1,100–1,600/m² — a £2.5m+ project, which is how purpose-built venues end up at TraffordCity’s £2.5m and Padium’s £5m. Standardised hall systems do the same enclosure for far less: Northpower’s off-the-shelf six-court padel hall (48×35m, 9.5m clear height, mezzanine included) lists at ~£530k plus VAT including assembly — in Sweden, where padel halls are a catalogue product. Northpower quotes with Swedish assembly and hasn’t sold in the UK — which is a phone call and a freight quote, not a wall, and the price gap leaves plenty of room to pay for delivery. The same product also exists with UK crews already in place: Hallgruppen (Stoke — two- to eight-court structures, own erection teams), Frisomat via TotalSpan (clear spans past 50m, eaves to 12m, engineered to UK Part L), Rubb (Gateshead — insulated fabric halls; one already houses a nine-court padel centre in the North East, and Rubb built Stratford Padel Club), SMC2 (glulam frames with translucent membrane — the most architectural catalogue product, with French padel references), and Smart-Space (the most active UK padel marketer, publishing ~£70–85k-per-court building costs). The real frictions on a direct import are smaller but real: the structure gets re-engineered to UK wind loads (EU CE marking itself remains accepted), a UK principal contractor has to run the site, and from January 2027 direct steel imports over £50k carry carbon-border paperwork. All of that is cost and admin to price, not a reason to rule the Swedish route out — the way to price it is to put Northpower’s delivered number next to the UK five and see whether the gap survives. Nobody in the UK has built a padel venue this way yet; operators here choose canopies or conventional builds. What it stacks to:

These are published unit rates assembled into a budget, not quotes — the spread is the honest width of the uncertainty, and the first action on this route is sending one specification to the five suppliers above and comparing what comes back.

A kit hall doesn’t have to look like one. The pattern in every good example is the same: a cheap standardised frame, with the money spent on the skin and the social end. Sweden’s most celebrated padel hall — Tengbom’s six-court hall at Mölnlycke, winner of two international architecture awards — is literally a relocated prefab kit with a designed envelope; Adare Manor’s padel club in Ireland is a hall wrapped in larch and glulam fins. The local design language already exists too: Sussex’s winery buildings (Wiston’s estate-oak cladding and flint gabions, Rathfinny dug into its hillside, Bolney’s timber visitor centre) are precisely “steel shed dressed for the landscape”, by architects working an hour away. Timber-clad visible elevations plus a glazed clubhouse frontage price at roughly £100–250k — 5–10% of the project — and the cheapest single move, dark matt micro-ribbed cladding instead of shiny box profile, costs almost nothing. Inside, the layout that works is a mezzanine lounge over the changing rooms: glass balustrade over the courts on one side (the pattern at Beaulieu Padel Club in Chelmsford), full-height glazing to the countryside on the other. No UK padel venue has built that dual-aspect room yet.

Planning is this route’s real risk, and it’s noise-shaped in our favour. A new building needs a full application, and indoor sport (Class E(d)) counts as a “town-centre use” in planning policy, so an out-of-centre site must pass a sequential test — evidence that no suitable existing building exists, which the height survey above conveniently is. National refusal patterns are noise, floodlighting and landscape; all three are answered by a fully enclosed, dark-sky-compliant building on an undesignated edge. Local timelines run from four months (the Albourne six-court scheme through Mid Sussex) to 25 (Leatherhead’s dome, delayed by ecology). Sport England and LTA support letters demonstrably help — one more reason the Tennis Sussex relationship in the next-steps sheet matters. The strongest applications sit on land where sport already lives, which drives this list:

The geography behind the list: Burgess Hill is the best-positioned town — its entire fringe is undesignated Low Weald, the National Park is three miles south, and it has real cycling infrastructure (the Green Circle network, plus the new cycle links built with the A2300 upgrade on its western edge). Haywards Heath is wrapped to the north and east by the High Weald National Landscape, which behaves like the park for planning purposes, leaving its south-west corridor. Hassocks abuts the park, but its Low Weald strip to the north-west looks back at the escarpment — the views are better from a mile back than from underneath. The Brighton fringe is out for new-build: the park boundary hugs the built edge, and the one open gap is a contested wildlife site. Two honesty notes: there is no usable cycle link between Burgess Hill and Haywards Heath, so “bikeable” means bikeable from one town, not both; and nothing above is a listing except Theobalds Road — the rest are approaches, which cost letters and get told “no” by default. The off-market channel matters most: the Burgess Hill land agents (SHW, Oakley, Hunters Commercial) see the one-acre plots before the portals do.

The site search therefore runs three tracks in parallel: the industrial shortlist above (fastest, cheapest to test, rented), partnership letters to the named rural sites (slower, someone else’s land), and the town-edge build (slowest and most capital — and the only version that ends with the full brief: bikeable, views, fully indoor, and a freehold on the balance sheet). The first track to produce a signable deal that passes the Section 7 numbers wins.

11Booking platform and route to market

• Launch on Playtomic. With ~80% of UK booking-platform share it is the discovery channel, and its management software covers scheduling, payments, matchmaking, tournaments and memberships. Costs are quote-only (roughly €100+/month SaaS plus an unpublished booking commission plus a player-side service fee); budget ~5% of court revenue and negotiate.
• Hold the member relationship directly. Memberships, leagues, coaching and events should run on the venue’s own systems, with Playtomic as top-of-funnel for casual hire. The platform risk is not the fee but customer ownership; a membership base is the structural hedge, and MATCHi and other platforms provide credible switching leverage in negotiation.
• Pre-launch: a founding-member tier (Club Padel’s “Original 100” and Padel Social Club’s sold-out tiers demonstrate willingness to pre-pay), a crowdfunding round doubling as member acquisition, founding sponsors and court naming rights sold before opening (local firms, sports brands, the corporate-events pipeline’s future customers), launch-week Americanos, and relationships with the rugby, tennis and golf clubs that already hold the target demographic.

12Risks

Stop criteria, agreed in advance: no suitable building within 9 months; asset-finance quotes above ~15% APR-equivalent; the equity round failing to close at a defensible valuation; Club Padel Shoreham visibly struggling on demand (rather than execution) by spring 2027; or the catchment court pipeline doubling again before a lease is signed. Any one of these triggers a stop, with total sunk cost held to the validation budget.

13Pricing

Blended court yield in the model: doubles ~£32/hour, singles ~£22/hour. The position is deliberately mid-market: premium experience at accessible prices, with membership carrying the loyalty economics.

14Next steps — 90-day validation plan

Weeks 1–4 — validate

1. Visit every venue in the Section 3 table as customers. Attempt peak bookings across two weeks on Playtomic/MATCHi and log actual availability — an independent occupancy dataset.
2. Brief SHW and Graves Son & Pilcher: 15–17,000 sq ft, 7m+ clear height, A23/A27 corridor. Obtain the genuine longlist and rents.
3. Present the Section 7 numbers to three asset-finance brokers (Johnson Reed first) and ask for indicative terms and deposit requirements — the fastest available feasibility test for Route A. In the same week, contact the South East Investment Fund’s managers to establish whether Route B exists for a first-time team.
4. Approach the Eixo and Smash Padel founders — recent local operators with direct experience of what they would do differently.

Weeks 5–8 — structure

5. Incorporate the company; agree founder equity, roles, and the personal-guarantee policy in writing.
6. Apply for EIS advance assurance.
7. Rebuild the model with actual rents and finance quotes; shortlist two buildings; obtain pre-application planning advice on the leading candidate.
8. Produce the investor one-pager from this document and soft-circle the equity round.

Weeks 9–13 — commit or stop

9. Heads of terms on a building (subject to planning), with the landlord contribution and rent-free period negotiated in.
10. Start Up Loan applications (×4); asset finance to credit approval; equity round open.
11. Formal decision against the Section 12 stop criteria. If proceeding: planning application submitted, licensing sequenced, opening targeted 6–9 months out.

Total cash at risk through week 13: approximately £5–10k (professional advice, pre-application fees, incorporation).

15Appendix — sources

Key sources behind the numbers (full URLs preserved in the research notes):

• Market: LTA participation and court statistics (May 2026: 1M players, 1,825 courts); Playtomic Global Padel Report 2026 (UK “Hotspot” classification, ~85% occupancy); Savills UK padel research (April 2025); Leisure DB UK padel report (December 2025).
• Local: Brighton & Hove City Council releases (Hove Beach Park 97% occupancy; Withdean covered courts, April 2026); Brighton & Hove News (Club Padel Shoreham, June 2026; Hove Fitness Centre objections); Mid Sussex DC planning records (DM/25/3096 Albourne; DM/26/0781 Burgess Hill); Playtomic/Playskan venue listings and pricing.
• Costs and planning: LTA Padel Court Construction Guidance (2025); published UK court supplier and installer pricing; steel-frame building cost guides; use-class and padel planning analyses (Nexa Law, Freeths); SDNPA Local Plan and Dark Skies Technical Advice Note; Licensing Act 2003 fee schedules.
• Financing: British Business Bank Start Up Loans terms (7.5% from April 2026); lender criteria (Funding Circle, iwoca, Starling, high-street banks); padel asset-finance brokers (Johnson Reed, GSM, Gable, Systems Finance); Padel Galis leasing terms; LTA Facility/Quick Access Loan schemes; British Business Bank South East Investment Fund; Crowdcube raises (Social Sports Society, The Padel Hub, Court de Padel, Smash Padel); NPIF II/The Padel Club case study; Padel Social Club £5.5m round (Active Partners, Clark Group, Stormzy).
• Cautionary: Sweden padel-market collapse coverage (European Business Magazine; Bloomberg, 2023; Creditsafe bankruptcy data); Playtomic Global Padel Report 2026 overcapacity analysis; UK squash participation decline data.