All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, private club and grounds in the Wimbledon neighbourhood of London, England, U.K., which is famed as the venue for the Wimbledon Championships in tennis. The club features 18 Championships grass courts, 20 practice grass courts, 8 clay courts, 2 acrylic courts, and 5 indoor courts. The largest of the grass courts, Centre Court, is where the marquee events of the Wimbledon Championships are played.
The club was founded as the All England Croquet Club in 1868, though its ground, then in Worple Road, Wimbledon, did not formally open until 1870. However, in 1874 the new game of lawn tennis was patented by a retired army major named Walter Wingfield and quickly became a hit, not least in Wimbledon. Like croquet, it was played on grass and did not need the expensive indoor courts required for the older “real” tennis. It had gained the upper hand over croquet by 1877, when the first Wimbledon tennis championships were contested, and the club changed its name to the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club. The story goes that the championships were held to bring in money to pay for the repair of the club’s pony-drawn lawn roller.
It was from that point that lawn tennis began to be taken seriously as a sport. In 1882 the club changed its name to the All England Lawn Tennis Club, as croquet had been extinguished at the club, but in the midst of a brief return of croquet, in 1899 the club’s name became the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. The Lawn Tennis Association was founded in 1888 as the game’s governing body in Britain and was closely linked with the Wimbledon club, which moved to the present ground in Church Road, opened by King George V, in 1922.
Women played the game successfully from early on and Wimbledon introduced ladies’ singles and gentlemen’s doubles in 1884, and ladies’ doubles and mixed doubles in 1913. Famous Wimbledon players of the 1880s included the twin brothers William and Ernest Renshaw, who introduced hard serves and volleys to what had been a more languid, gentle game. William Renshaw won the singles title seven times. Originally, the Wimbledon championships were open only to amateurs (real or supposed), but in 1968—the start of the “open era”—the distinction was dropped, and all players were permitted to play in all tournaments.
The history of the game and the championships is engagingly displayed in the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum, which opened in 1977, the centenary of the first championship games, and tours of the grounds are also available.