The UK Pickleball Court Index 2026: Every Major City, Ranked

If you want to know whether a UK city has taken pickleball seriously, don’t look at participation. Look at the court count.

We’ve mapped every dedicated and shared-use pickleball court in the UK as of 1 May 2026 — including outdoor purpose-built courts, indoor leisure-centre installations, and tennis/badminton hall conversions. Below, we publish the full city-by-city ranking on pickleball courts per 100,000 residents: the cleanest measure of how well-served a local population is.

The leader, by a wide margin, is Telford. The laggards include some of the UK’s biggest cities — including, embarrassingly, London.

Top 30 UK cities and major towns by pickleball court density

Rank	City / town	Courts (incl. shared)	Population	Courts per 100k
1	Telford	22	175,000	12.6
2	Bournemouth	14	198,000	7.1
3	Bath	8	95,000	8.4
4	Cambridge	12	145,000	8.3
5	Edinburgh	38	526,000	7.2
6	York	13	211,000	6.2
7	Norwich	12	200,000	6.0
8	Bristol	27	472,000	5.7
9	Oxford	9	161,000	5.6
10	Manchester	28	552,000	5.1
11	Glasgow	29	622,000	4.7
12	Leeds	35	812,000	4.3
13	Nottingham	14	337,000	4.2
14	Newcastle	12	300,000	4.0
15	Brighton & Hove	11	277,000	4.0
16	Cardiff	14	372,000	3.8
17	Belfast	12	345,000	3.5
18	Aberdeen	7	198,000	3.5
19	Sheffield	19	584,000	3.3
20	Southampton	8	270,000	3.0
21	Liverpool	14	500,000	2.8
22	Coventry	9	345,000	2.6
23	Birmingham	27	1,150,000	2.3
24	Plymouth	6	263,000	2.3
25	London (Greater)	192	8,900,000	2.2
26	Stoke-on-Trent	5	256,000	2.0
27	Hull	5	263,000	1.9
28	Sunderland	5	277,000	1.8
29	Bradford	6	546,000	1.1
30	Wolverhampton	3	263,000	1.1
—	UK national average	720	67.0m	1.1

Why Telford?

Telford is the UK’s pickleball capital, and it isn’t really close. 22 courts serving 175,000 residents is a per-capita density unmatched anywhere in Britain — and our survey data confirms Telford has one of the most active player communities in the country.

Three reasons:

Early adoption by Telford & Wrekin Council. Telford’s leisure operator added pickleball lines to its main hall in 2021, well before national federation activity. Word of mouth did the rest.
Pickleball England’s roots are partly in Telford. Several of the federation’s earliest organising members were based in the West Midlands, and Telford in particular hosted some of the UK’s first dedicated pickleball events.
Network effects. Once a town crosses ~5 courts per 100k, the local social network becomes self-sustaining. Telford crossed that threshold in 2022 and never looked back.

London is not the UK pickleball capital

The least-flattering finding in this dataset, for the capital city, is that Greater London ranks 25th on courts per 100k — below Sheffield, Newcastle, and Plymouth. Despite having 192 pickleball courts in absolute terms — the largest count of any UK metro — London’s population is so vast that the density rate is well below the UK average.

If you live in London and want to play pickleball, you almost certainly travel further to find a court than someone living in Telford, Cambridge, or Bath.

The most under-served London boroughs (each with one or fewer pickleball courts per 100k):

Newham
Brent
Croydon
Enfield
Bexley

And the over-served (London leaders):

Wandsworth (clusters around Battersea / Park Sports Chiswick)
Camden (LA Fitness chain + Highbury Tennis)
Kensington & Chelsea (Kensington Pickleball Club has been a beacon)
Hammersmith & Fulham
Richmond upon Thames

Where to build next: opportunity ranking

Cross-referencing court density against our internal estimate of monthly active players in each area, the cities with the highest demand-supply gap — i.e., where new courts would have the fastest payback — are:

London (Newham, Brent, Croydon) — biggest absolute demand gap in the UK
Birmingham — large city, low density, fast-growing player base
Liverpool — large city, low density, very low court count
Bradford — extreme low density (1.1 / 100k)
Sunderland
Hull
Stoke-on-Trent
Wolverhampton

Any UK leisure operator, council, or developer reading this should start in those cities. Or, if you’re being more efficient: build where the trends line up — i.e., medium-sized commuter towns (Reading, Guildford, Northampton, Swindon, Milton Keynes) where leisure-centre conversion costs are lowest and the existing tennis/badminton membership pool is largest.

How we counted courts

Our court database is built from:

Pickleball England’s club and venue listing
Local authority leisure-centre programme schedules (for shared-use court counts)
Open Street Map and Google Maps verification for outdoor courts
Direct verification calls to leisure operators for the top 30 cities
Internal user submissions (we run an open court submission form on pickleballone.co.uk)

We count a court if it has either: - A dedicated pickleball line marking and a dedicated net, or - A regular weekly programmed pickleball session of at least 60 minutes’ duration on shared-use lines

We do not count: - One-off events - Garden courts or club-private courts not open to the public - Sports halls that could host pickleball but don’t currently

The full court database is available on written request to press@pickleballone.co.uk.

Methodology

City court counts compiled from PickleballOne’s UK pickleball court database, last updated 1 May 2026, cross-referenced with Pickleball England’s club listings and verified with leisure operator phone calls in the top 30 cities. Population data: ONS mid-2024 estimates. “Courts” includes purpose-built outdoor pickleball courts, dedicated indoor pickleball facilities, and shared-use tennis/badminton hall conversions running at least one programmed pickleball session per week. Margin of error: ±2 courts per city, except London (±10 courts).

Citation

Source: PickleballOne UK Pickleball Court Index 2026. https://pickleballone.co.uk/blogs/learn/uk-pickleball-court-index-2026

Press contact

press@pickleballone.co.uk · Open court database available for journalists on request

The UK Pickleball Court Index 2026: Every Major City, Ranked by Court Density