Queen's Club

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Entrance to Queen's Club during preparations for the 2005 Queen's Club Championships.

The Queen's Club is a private sporting club in West Kensington, London. Founded in 1886, the Queen's Club was the world's first multipurpose sports complex. The club hosts the prestigious annual Queen's Club Championships grass court men's lawn tennis tournament. With two courts it is also the national headquarters of real tennis, hosting the British Open every year. The Queen's Club also has racquets courts and squash courts.

It was also the Jeu de paume venue of the 1908 Summer Olympics.

Until 1922, the club was the main ground for the football games of Corinthian. One international was held, England drawing 1-1 with Wales on March 18, 1895. Corinthian Casuals have proposed moving back to Queens Club, now it will not be hosting a warm-up tennis competition for Wimbledon.

On September 13, 2005, the Lawn Tennis Association, the governing body of British lawn tennis, put the Queen's Club up for sale. The LTA owned Queen's since 1953. The terms required that the rackets club and the Artois Championships (formerly the Stella Artois Championships) remain unaffected. On March 8, 2006, the LTA announced that it would sell to club members for £45 million, ending seven-months of uncertainty about the club's future.^[1] 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. ^[2]

The LTA is relocating its headquarters by early 2007 to the new National Tennis Centre, currently under construction in Roehampton.