The Queen's Club is a private sporting club in West Kensington, London, England. Founded in 1886, the Queen's Club was the world's first multipurpose sports complex and named after Queen Victoria, its first patron. The club hosts the prestigious annual Queen's Club Championships grass court men's lawn tennis tournament (currently known as the AEGON Championships for sponsorship reasons). It has 28 outdoor courts and eight indoor. With two courts, it is also the national headquarters of real tennis, hosting the British Open every year. The Queen's Club also has rackets, and squash courts, of which it now has become the headquarters for these sports due to the Prince's Club closure in 1940.
It was also the jeu de paume (real tennis) and rackets venue of the 1908 Summer Olympics.
Until 1922, the club was the main ground for the football games of Corinthian F.C. One international was held, England drawing 1–1 with Wales on 18 March 1895.
On 13 September 2005, the Lawn Tennis Association, the governing body of British lawn tennis, which had owned Queen's since 1953, put the club up for sale. The terms required that the rackets club and the Queen's Club Championships remain unaffected (the site's value for residential or commercial redevelopment might greatly exceed its value as a sports club, in the event that planning permission could be obtained, and the LTA wished to preserve the club's role in British tennis). On 8 March 2006, the LTA announced that it would sell to club members for £45 million, ending seven months of uncertainty about the club's future. However some members disputed the LTA's right to sell the club, which they contested it merely held in trust on their behalf, and began to raise funds to dispute the sale in court. In late 2006 the two sides reached an out of court settlement in which the sale price was reduced to £35 million.
In February 2007, the LTA relocated its headquarters from Queen's Club to the new National Tennis Centre in Roehampton. The AEGON Championships still remains one of the six most prestigious grass competitions on the men's ATP tour along with the Gerry Weber Open in Halle, Germany, the AEGON International, the Hall of Fame Tennis Championships in Newport, Rhode Island, the UNICEF Open in the Netherlands and of course Wimbledon.
The ball girls are selected from year 8, 9 and 10 pupils at St Philomena's Catholic High School for Girls and Nonsuch High School.
Famous quotes containing the words queen and/or club:
“I do not so much rejoice that God hath made me to be a Queen, as to be a Queen over so thankful a people.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)