Club de Padel plans five-court return to Manchester under the Mayfield Park arches

Club de Padel, the padel brand born in Manchester, has found its way back into the city. The Mayfield Partnership has lodged a planning application with Manchester City Council for a five-court covered club beneath the railway arches of Depot Mayfield, inside Mayfield Park and next to the children's playground. The scheme includes a coffee bar and an events space, and the target is to open in summer 2027 if planning approval comes through.

The operator has been without a home since January. Its first club opened in 2023 at the foot of the Deansgate Square towers with four outdoor courts, on a meanwhile site that developer Renaker needed for five new skyscrapers. Court bookings were free right up to the closure on 14 January as a send-off. In the meantime, the brand still runs the club it opened in Sheffield in 2025.

The new site carries weight in the city. Mayfield is the 24-acre regeneration next to Piccadilly station, with a public park that opened in 2022 and a former railway depot already home to Freight Island and The Warehouse Project. Henrietta Nowne, development director at Landsec, speaking for the Mayfield Partnership, called the club "a brilliant addition to Mayfield Park".

The deal lands in the middle of a British padel boom. According to the LTA, the governing body for tennis and padel in Great Britain, one million adults and juniors have now played the sport, up from around 15,000 in 2019, across 1,825 courts at 551 venues. An operator betting on covered courts in central Manchester, with northern England's weather, says a lot about where the demand is.

For a club starting out with five courts, a coffee bar and an events programme, the on-court experience is what sets it apart; at Kronoset we explain why a digital scoreboard makes a club more profitable.

Sources: Place North West, Manchester's Finest and LTA.

Illustrative image generated with AI; not a photo of the event.