A Padel Court Under the Westway

Drive west out of central London and you pass under the Westway without really seeing it. Most of us do. It is a road on stilts, a long grey ribbon of concrete carrying traffic over the rooftops of Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove. Underneath, in the gaps between the columns, the city does what it tends to do with leftover space. It parks cars, stores things, forgets.

A while back we were asked to draw up a concept for one of those gaps, close to Portobello Market and the Grand Union Canal, in the half light beneath the flyover. The brief was simple enough on paper. Could you put a padel court and a small community pavilion down here? The answer turned out to be more interesting than the question.

A covered padel court designed by RISE Design Studio, where a planted living wall and an overhead rooflight bring daylight and greenery into a space more usually left in shadow.

Working with what is already there

There is a rough beauty to this site, and we did not want to tidy it away. The columns are streaked with age and old graffiti. Traffic hums overhead. Light comes down in thin shafts where the overpasses don't quite meet. Plenty of proposals would treat all of that as a problem to be covered up. We treated it as the starting point.

What the client wanted was not polish. They wanted character. A space tough enough to take urban life on the chin, and warm enough that you would still want to spend an evening in it. So the court and pavilion are designed to feel embedded, as though they had been waiting for the right moment to appear, rather than dropped in from somewhere more manicured.

The court, and the room beside it

Padel is a good fit for a place like this. It is fast, sociable, easy to pick up, and it needs a fraction of the room a tennis court does. Ours sits neatly between the existing columns, sheltered by the structure above and open to the air at the sides. Integrated lighting keeps it usable through the darker months, and acoustic buffers take the edge off the traffic so a rally doesn't have to compete with a passing bus.

Next to the court is the pavilion, which is part shelter and part somewhere to linger. It is timber framed and panel clad, and its rhythm picks up on the viaduct overhead without trying to mimic it. Large sliding doors open the inside straight onto the court, so the same room can host coaching one afternoon and a film night the next, or simply give people somewhere to sit and watch a game with a drink in hand.

Inside, the space is set up to flex:

• A social room for forty to sixty people, with partitions that move
• A small café bar for drinks and simple food
• Toilets, changing facilities, and an accessible WC
• Secure storage for kit, with room for stringing and repairs
• AV and WiFi for screenings and workshops
• Seating, bike parking, and planted edges outside to soften the hard ground

The palette leans into the setting. Corrugated metal, charred timber, exposed fixings. None of it precious. But the things that make a space comfortable to be in are quietly looked after underneath: good insulation, acoustic treatment, lighting that flatters rather than glares. It can take a knock and still feel like somewhere you belong.

Built to last under a motorway

Under the Westway you cannot afford to waste anything, least of all heat or money. That shaped the engineering more than any sustainability label did. Air source heat pumps do the heavy lifting so the building leans away from gas. South facing structures nearby carry solar panels. Rainwater is collected and put to work on cleaning and the planting. The materials were chosen to be recycled where possible, low in embodied carbon, and gentle on the air inside the room.

We did not do any of this to make a point. We did it because a community building only earns its place if it stays cheap to run and pleasant to use for decades, long after the opening day photographs are forgotten. The comfort is meant to be felt rather than read off a spec sheet.

A different kind of club

This is not Wimbledon, and there would be no sense in pretending otherwise. It is louder, grittier, more alive than that. Music carrying under concrete. A teenager finding a sport for the first time somewhere between the buses and the skateboards. An older regular telling a story nobody asked for, between sets. The city, at play, in a spot it had written off.

We tend to think this is one of the more useful things architecture can do. Not invent space out of nothing, but notice the room that was already there and going to waste, and give people a reason to gather in it. The design reached this point and then paused, the client's plans on hold for now, the drawings waiting. That happens. Whether this particular gap gets its court, or whether the idea lands somewhere else entirely, the least we can do is show that it is possible.

Thinking about an overlooked space in your own neighbourhood? We're always happy to talk through what it could become. Please do get in touch.

→ Email us at architects@risedesignstudio.co.uk
→ Or call the studio on 020 3947 5886

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