Page 519 - The Secret Museum

The other framed plan by Stanley Peach is a much smaller, coloured sketch

showing the complete layout of the club. According to Peach’s original design,
Centre Court was not in the centre but in the far north of the ground. That is because it
was first named Centre Court at its original location in nearby Worple Road, and the
name stuck.

Honor showed me the most recent map of the site, and we could see that
everything Peach designed remains pretty much the same now. The big change is that
the club has doubled in size since 1921, and Centre Court is now the centre of the
club, as the site has expanded northwards, on to what were once green playing fields.

The tea lawn has been paved over, and is now the entrance you’ll walk across if you
come in from Gate 4 or 5, as I did.

The plans came into the museum collection only quite recently. When the new
retractable roof of Centre Court was unveiled, the museum wanted to put on an
exhibition about the history of the court, and wondered where the plans for it could
be. The hundreds in the collection were unearthed in the cupboards of Stanley
Peach’s architecture firm, now called Peach and Partners, and in the club surveyor’s
office. The plans arrived all rolled up in tubes, some with tattered ends.

One by one, 200 blueprints and elevations, tracing cloths and photostats were

taken out of their tubes, unrolled and prepared for conservation, protected by plastic
covers. They are now kept in a big wooden plan chest in storage, while another 250
are yet to be conserved. The colourful Centre Court plan and the sketch of the whole
of Peach’s new Wimbledon hang in the same room, mounted in their frames on racks,
with other posters and paintings of and about Wimbledon.

We took a few other plans out of their drawers to get a feel for the collection. I
looked at a blueprint for the committee and royal box, and for the clubhouse. This
was a working drawing and showed where the kitchen, bar, press room, telephones

and – most importantly – tea rooms, should go. This was Drawing 11812 – originally
there must have been heaps more than now survive at the museum, plans used by
contractors and carried around by Peach and the team of builders and surveyors as
they built the tennis club.

I saw the less glamorous side of Centre Court, too: a drawing on tracing cloth for
the gas and electricity supply. It’s quite dirty, as it was the original version used by
the builders on the job. There are sketches of the iconic criss-cross balustrade and a
photostat showing all the different columns used; the ground it was built on slopes, so

all the columns are different heights. Now, there are only four super-columns instead.
On other blueprints someone has drawn little caricatures of Mr Tennis and Mr Lawn.

When Centre Court opened it was a hit. The Architect’s Journal compared the
court, with its 14,000 seats and standing spots, to a Roman amphitheatre, ‘like the
Colosseum … the “arena” is simply a rectangle of vividly green turf, but it’s no less
the centre of intense interest than was that other arena whose terrors provided the
sport of an ancient Roman holiday.’