Horsell Cricket Club Padel Plan: Lights On Until 10pm

A floodlit padel court, open for hire from 7am to 10pm every day of the week, is proposed for the corner of Woking and Horsell Cricket Club nearest Arthur’s Bridge Road. Woking Borough Council validated the application on Monday 24 August, and residents have until Friday 18 September to comment.

The scheme is reference PLAN/2026/0596 on the council’s planning register. It sits in Horsell ward, and the case officer is Harsha Bhundia. The council’s own deadline for a decision is Monday 19 October.

What is being asked for

The application covers five things:

• a single padel court, 20 metres by 10 metres, enclosed by glass and mesh walls three to four metres high
• a separate canopy over it, 22 metres by 11 metres, with a white marquee-style roof on aluminium posts, seven metres to the eaves and 8.7 metres to the ridge
• floodlights on six-metre columns, aimed downwards
• the existing cricket nets moved to the south west of the pitch and replaced
• new timber field gates and a new pedestrian gate on the Arthur’s Bridge Road frontage

The court itself would be run by EzeePadel Woking, which would lease the land from the cricket club. The same operator runs Weybridge Padel Club. All of that is set out in the planning statement submitted by Verve Planning on 20 August (Woking Borough Council planning register).

The club site is designated Urban Open Space. The land immediately to the south, Horsell Moor, is registered common land. Trees around the boundary are covered by a tree preservation order, TPO 626/0248/1979.

The council’s constraints tab lists 13 designations touching the site. Among them:

• Common Land number CL112
• Thames Basin Heaths Special Protection Area, zone B, 400m to 5km
• a great crested newt green zone
• surface water flooding, 30 year
• the Fairoaks airport safety zone
• TPO 626/0248/1979, covering an oak and a group of trees on the site

None of those is a bar in itself. They are the tests the case officer has to work through, and they are why the application arrived with an ecology report, a tree survey, a noise assessment and light spill calculations attached.

Lights, noise and the 10.15pm curfew

The lighting is the part neighbours are most likely to notice. The planning statement says the floodlights would be used mainly in winter, when daylight runs out, and that they would be switched off from 10.15pm to 7am.

On noise, an environmental survey was carried out at two points representing the nearest homes. The applicant’s acoustic consultant predicts a sound level of 48 decibels at both, and compares that with the existing background it measured:

• 54 dB daytime average and 52 dB evening average at the receptor to the south
• 61 dB daytime average and 59 dB evening average at the receptor to the north west

On those figures the padel court would be quieter than the road and general background noise already there, and the report concludes that noise “should not be grounds for refusal of planning permission”. Whether the council’s own environmental health officers agree is a separate question, and their response will appear on the documents tab as it is received.

Floodlighting is not new to this site. The register records permissions in 1992 and 1997 for the continued use of floodlighting at the cricket club two nights a week.

No parking at all

The scheme offers no car parking. That is deliberate, and it is the point most likely to divide people on the surrounding streets.

The transport statement, prepared by Pulsar Transport Planning, states that visitors arriving by car “will not be provided with dedicated off-street parking and will not be permitted to use the car park associated with the squash club”. Two covered cycle spaces would be provided instead.

The reasoning given is that the site is about 450 metres from Woking town centre and 1.4km from the station, and that the council’s own pre-application advice confirmed dedicated parking would not be required. The council’s 2018 parking standards allow a maximum of four spaces per tennis or badminton court, with a 50% reduction in the town centre and zero or shared parking encouraged there.

On demand, the statement takes a worst case of four people arriving and four leaving within any one hour, since a court holds four players and bookings usually run an hour. It argues those movements are spread through the day rather than concentrated in the rush hour.

The dates that matter

What it means for you

If you live on Arthur’s Bridge Road, Brewery Road, Horsell Moor or the streets behind them, this is the window. Comments lodged after Friday 18 September may still be read, but the consultation expiry is the date the council works to, and the target decision date is 19 October.

Comments go through the application’s own page on the council planning register. Points about light spill, noise after dark and where players will park are planning matters. Objections to padel as a sport, or to who profits from it, are not.

The full document set, including the noise assessment, the light spill calculations, the tree report and the 3D visuals, is on the documents tab and is free to read.

Our Woking planning applications page explains how to search the register, how long you have to comment and what the council can and cannot take into account.