By Alex Taylor
I’m sitting in Jason Kerrigan’s cottage in a residential area of Sutton Coldfield, when the conversation turns to the conspiratorial. In a low whisper, Jason unspools the story of the fox.
The fox had a den behind the row of houses Jason and his neighbours live in, backing onto the local tennis court. The fox was beloved by the local community, Jason tells me. He would often film it on his phone and his neighbours enjoyed watching it scurry about. Then, one day last year, Jason went out back to where the den was located, only to discover bags of poison. He instinctively knew what had happened. Soon after that, two of his neighbours, Janice and John, found the dead body of the fox up the side of their garden. They had their suspicions — to put it lightly. “We know who did it,” Jason tells me.
It was an email that first alerted me to the plight of Jason, his neighbours and (by extension) the fox. An email about a sport called padel. Padel, in case you don’t know, fuses elements of tennis and squash. It’s fast-paced, strategic and chaotic — and apparently, it’s the fastest-growing sport in the world. Games are enclosed within a compact, glass surround, and players wield solid rackets — more of a bat — to return a small, depressurised ball that ricochets off the surrounding walls. The design of the court not only intensifies the unpredictable gameplay but amplifies the sound. The sharp crack of the racket and the echoing bounce of the ball is often compared to the sound of gunshots; and consequently, sparks controversy.
In the Netherlands, authorities have set strict limits on decibel levels to address concerns about noise disturbances in residential areas. The sport is in its infancy in the UK, and no such ruling is yet in place — which has led some people living near courts to take matters into their own hands. Recently, in Winchester, a group has been threatening to take their padel-playing neighbours to the highest courts in the land. In Hampshire, talk of noise abatement orders is all the rage.
What began in Mexico in 1969, the brainchild of Enrique Corcuera, a wealthy businessman living in the country’s Acapulco beach resort who found tennis too physically demanding, has now found its way to Sutton Coldfield. In 2017, the Sutton Coldfield Tennis Club constructed a padel court on their site, replacing two junior tennis courts. They were latching on to a much wider trend: the Financial Times has reported that investors across the globe are “rush[ing] to build courts and open clubs to cash in on the surging popularity of padel as a fun recreational pursuit.” By 2026, Deloitte predicts, there will be 84,000 padel courts, twice the number in 2023.
The email in question was sent by Jason Kerrigan, a middle-aged former journalist. His concern? The planned construction of three more courts in Sutton Coldfield — given the first had already caused serious tensions in a tight-knit community. The email was hardly pulling punches. “It's fair to call the building of these padel courts across the UK controversial because they can be utterly ruinous to the lives of those living anywhere near them,” he wrote. “They are truly as cacophonous AF [as fuck]!”
Jason contended that the tennis (and now padel) club had ignored a series of issues raised by the community — most notably that they were constructing the court within ear-range of 124 people, 107 of which were OAPs and some of which were seriously or terminally ill. “Skullduggerous and loathsome in equal measure,” Jason wrote. “And always served with a high-handed pomposity of tone not experienced since the days of Lord Haw-Haw”.
