The work to prepare Wimbledon 2025 begins around Monday, after the 2024 final. The grass has become a sheep track: for two weeks, friction and restarts, sliding and braking with the foot sideways, as many people now know how to do on the native surface of tennis, they scored deeply and often ruined the court as if a herd of buffalo had crossed them fleeing from predators. There are no treatments, patches and reseeding that hold up and so yes, those who have a passion for the post-event can exercise it, for example, by booking a visit to the All England Club as soon as the Slam has packed up and everyone has left.
The most famous perimeter tour in tennis history is available more or less all year round: from ten in the morning to five in the evening. Fifteen pounds just for the museum, twenty-seven with the tour of the club and it must be said that, beyond the die-hard and chronic enthusiasts, the guides are equipped to tell anecdotes unknown to most. Among the attractions of the spaces reserved for memorabilia, a hologram of John McEnroe in the changing rooms – it’s a McGenius with a few fewer gray hairs – and, for those who are passionate about the history of sport, the Victorian dresses of the first winners, from the junoesque Dorothea Lambert Chambers to the petite Lottie Dod who, beyond the five titles won between 1887 and 1893, the first of whom was fifteen years old, she had time to become a champion in golf, field hockey, archery and a rescue heroine during the First World War. Those thick and constricting dresses, those rackets that looked like badly sawn crooked mandolins not only convey the very passion british for the preservation of what was but also the unimaginable difficulties of playing tennis when it was invented in its contemporary meaning, one hundred and fifty years ago, while today space rackets can make even the most negative Sunday tennis player dribble. Alongside, the most iconic uniforms and tools of the trade: Sampras’ Nikes and his black Wilson Pro Staff, Federer’s bandanas and suits with gold piping, Nadal’s vest, Bjorn Borg’s hyper-fitted polo shirt by Fila and his racket Donnay with the leather grip so long that it seemed like two people had to hold it.
If New York is the city that never sleeps, the suburb of Wimbledon hosts the Slam that never sleeps. When an edition of the tournament ends, a dossier of about two hundred pages is compiled that the Sports Turf Research Institute gives to the gardeners. It is a series of considerations on the maintenance of the turf and tests that the team in charge of safeguarding the most famous green rectangle in the world must begin to do in the days around Christmas. Among the myriad of variables to consider in preparing the ground for the following year, there are the excursions of foxes to take into account: Wimbledon is located not far from the Southfields stop and the name betrays the presence of so much flora and fauna, especially on the opposite side of Church Road where the large Wimbledon park expands. Fox urine is harmful to the ryegrass and fescue, it dries them out. These are all things that can be learned by visiting Wimbledon away from the tournament. After that, there is a naturalistic side to the unknown to enthusiasts: there are fifty thousand trees, trunks, bushes, bulbs, plants and borders to look after, replace if dry, fertilize. The bulk of the work begins at the end of the season in which the All England members can compete on the club’s courts – except for Centre Court – and that is around September. The calendar of things to do to rebuild the courts in time for the next edition is dictated, needless to say, by the weather. There are years in which, in October, it rains almost every day and the gardeners are sheltered, waiting in vain for a break in the sky to allow them to make up for lost time. The amount of work is monumental: nineteen courts for the Slam, another twenty-two for training. And, once the rectangles have been milled and the bottom restored, the grass must be sown and grown before the arrival of general winter. Those who are good at calculations have established that, if placed one next to the other, all the courts of Wimbledon would cover the surface of Trafalgar Square. And they are not all the same: some courts are the result of the latest renovations and restructuring; others are almost as old as the first editions of the tournament.
By the way: in the months away from the tournament, Wimbledon tries to transform itself into something else. At the end of November, for example, there is a Winterfest dedicated to something Londoners are not used to experiencing: snow. Shops selling Alpine-inspired souvenirs, ice sculptures, things like that. When the weather forecast announces the first night temperatures that are close to zero, the court specialists have already – rain permitting – spread a root-strengthening fertilizer and a fungicide to prevent the humidity from rotting the newly-grown lawns and, when the end of the year approaches, in the hall that leads to the entrance to the center court – the one where the oft-quoted phrase by Kudyard Kipling about triumph and failure being two impostors stands out, and go and tell that to Federer in 2019 or Roddick, his victim in 2009 – a really nice Christmas tree is put up. If, however, you are attracted by the festivities of other civilizations, two streets further away – in Calonne Road – there is an enormous Thai temple, the Buddhapadipa. Surrounded by a fabulous garden, inside is an explosion of color and spirituality. Wandering along lanes and bridges, among exotic vegetation and without any interference from the nearby western urbanization, it is easy to lose your temporal orientation and the reason why you went there.
For those who were not there, at Wimbledon as a sporting event, it is sad to point out that strawberries with cream may be a tradition but the strawberries that grow in those parts, with the pale sun, taste of cucumber and what we have hastily translated as “cream” is not the sweetened and whipped cream we are used to but a cream sweetish, liquid, which largely ends up at the bottom of a glass sold at unacceptable mark-ups. Better, therefore, to keep that bit of hunger and leave Wimbledon – understood as the All England Club – and seek satisfaction elsewhere. There’s a place called The Fox and the Grapes, The fox&the grapes, a gastropub in which the evil Albion tries to make us change our minds about the gross, if not disgusting, alcoholic habits of that island. The cuisine tends to be international, with some references to the area – Barnsley lamb, Welsh salmon, Yorkshire apple pie, a selection of British cheeses. And a decent wine list, although the best supply – many restaurants in the city also use it – is offered by Wimbledon Wine Cellar, run for about forty years by Andrew Pavli. Another place worth visiting is the Black Lamb, which is keen to be defined local&wild for the preference for lightly processed or refined ingredients and, if possible, obtained from local flora and fauna. To nourish other vital organs there is a very well-stocked bookshop, it is called Wimbledon Books and bears the colors of tennis (green and purple) but no, it does not only sell those tomes of statistics that the Club has churned out for decades under the direction of Alan Little, for a lifetime librarian and living memory of the tournament. Other small gems are half-hidden in the Village, such as the renovation of a 17th century pub, the Rose&Crown.
If you want to see what a late 19th century clothes and bric-a-brac shop in the suburbs of London might have looked like, for example, you can search for Elys. Or rather, search for images of the old tailor’s shop opened by Joseph Ely and try to understand what has been kept of it. tailoring&outfitting opened in 1876. Not much, to be honest: but the warehouse still stands on the corner of Worple Road. Doesn’t that name mean anything to you? Walk down the road until you come to a green gate, which opens onto a brick wall. There is a plaque there that commemorates the first edition of Wimbledon, hosted on that ground until, in 1922, the All England changed location for reasons of capacity and expansion. The first Wimbledon courts have become lawns for secondary school children to play on but, with a little imagination, you can still see them. If you close your eyes, outside of recess time, you can still hear the rustle of the skirts of the ancestors, unaware of fighting for the most precious trophy in the world.
