Do you think tennis is a ' posh ' sport?

And I do not know any parks in poorer areas that have tennis courts you can use. Not one.

Yes posh.
People keep talking about a knockaround in the local park being cheap, but that is very different from playing on a proper well maintained court.

How many under privileged kids do you know who have tennis lessons?

Yes

We happen to live near (community) tennis courts and for some reason it elevates the neighbourhood

I think it was more posh 50 years ago, but having said that, my father was the son of a coal miner & played.
Our local club is £100/year and is not for profit, run by volunteers. It's very middle class (definitely not a posh club) but we live in a very middle class area.

When they have a private court in their back garden, yes.

Otherwise, not at all. Around here, you can find free or ridiculously cheap courts in local parks and local sports clubs.

I suppose anyone can kick a football and play anywhere, while people probably benefit from lesson to learn to play tennis, which might make it sound "posher" for some.

Yes but it doesn't need to be.

It is because:
-court hire is expensive, even local authority, compared to using a playing field for free
-they dont teach it at most state schools so requires private lessons or club
-theres a social networking attached to it. They don't have Pimm's, linen dresses, strawberries and aristocrats at the Euros do they...

Yes. If it weren't, you'd have state secondary schools with tennis courts and not just the local private school. (I acknowledge there are exceptions here and there).

Any sport that requires specialist facilities unlikely to be provided by the state is a posh sport. Swimming isn't (leisure centre pools) and obviously things that can share a mixed use grass pitch (football, rugby, field hockey, whatever).

If you need to join a club with a dress code (tennis and golf) it's not for the plebs.

Oh I agree with this: it's a great sport. Brilliant to watch the highly skilled professionals but also great fun for anyone to play.

I should add it's a brilliant sport. Our club has people in their 80s playing - keeping active and being sociable and presumably saving the NHS money. I am in love with tennis!

No. I come from a really working class area and we had tennis courts at school and were taught to play in PE lessons. Lots of us played in the local tennis club (which hired the school courts in an evening).

The council also has tennis courts in the park which are really cheap to hire for a couple of hours. I played a lot when younger and so have my kids. A racket doesn't cost much. Sports Direct has them for less than £30 often.

It's not something I would ever see as 'posh' to be honest.

As a kid we had almost no public tennis courts, so it wasn’t a popular sport. Football was really cheap in comparison. A couple of jumpers for goals and a ball is all you need for footy, which is why it’s so widely played…

I learned to 'play' in the street with my sister as a child. Our crappy comp didn't offer tennis on any of its tarmac courts in the 1980s. And I never had lessons. When I was 35 I started playing properly at a club in London. It didn't insist on proper whites or anything like that although there was a membership of a few hundred pounds a year. I'm now 58 and live in Cornwall (back where I began!) and am a member of a lovely club that charges me around £300 a year. For that (if iI have time) I can play every day. It's lovely. And mostly not at all stuffy. The really good players had lessons as children, though I hold my own because I't fit and have a good long-limbed tennis body.
In summary, I started poor, and when I had money joined a club. I don't therefore view it as (too) posh!

Yes! And I say that as someone who is now part of a tennis club… it’s getting access to courts. Our city actually has a lot of courts in parks for anyone to use, pay as you go, but I think that’s unusual.

It is here as there’s no tennis courts in any of the parks and it’s £25 an hour to hire the tennis club court (not including equipment hire).

Where BIL lives it’s not as the park has loads of courts and kids can hire them for £5 including racquets and balls

It depends where they play it.

If someone mentions that they play tennis, the next question will be "Oh, where do you play?".

Yes it is posh. You need a minimum of one adult per match, and a match can go on for hours and have only two players - so yes, very posh. Tennis tournaments often have more umpires, line umpires, ball boys and girls, all these people available and serving just 2 or 4 players - very privileged and unnatural

Yes. Slightly more so than cricket.

going off the point a bit I am always confused as to why running (my sport) is so middle class as at least to start off it costs nothing at all other than a pair of trainers

British tennis tradionally always had this problem of tennis being accessible only to more well off and privately educated people.
That's why they used to make a big thing of someone like Dan Evans having a father who was an electrician. Or, in his day, James Ward having a father who was a taxi driver. Because they were seen as from coming a different demographic to the majority of players.
People like Judy Murray have done a tremendous job at grass roots level trying to make tennis available to all different types of young people. Going into schools and giving them a taste for the sport and trying to make coaching available to children from all backgrounds.

My DH is a member of a tennis club.
It's cheaper per month than most gyms but it is quite posh

I think it is perceived as posh because not all schools will have the number of courts to offer it to a whole class of pupils. At my Grammar school in 70s/80s we had about 6 courts so one class of girls could just about all play doubles if some were umpires /lines people. The dress rules also seemed to come into play as soon as you were playing above class lesson standard. Tennis clubs do seem to attract a particular social grouping although there are always exceptions. As others have said, at grass root standard it is not expensive racquet, balls, marked out court, some sort of net. But there are other sports that are cheaper and can involve more people at a time.

In terms of cost, yes it's cheaper to just rent a court and turn up with balls and a second hand racket (I want to spell it racquet, where has that come from?), but in order to do that you have to be able to play.

I went to a pretty normal school and I think I might have done tennis for half a term one summer in my seven years there. The rest of the time it was netball or hockey, and a similarly brief foray into cricket.

So I would say that to be good enough to be able to make use of the cheap 'use a court in the park' side of tennis, you have to spend money on lessons etc.

Unless my school wasn't representative. Weirdly we did lacrosse more than tennis because we were local to a very sporty university and (almost exclusively American) students used to come and teach us.

Yes it's posh.

A lot of tennis clubs charge a lot to be a member which encourages the wealthier and snobbish to join.

No thank you.

To be fair all you need for tennis is a court and some rackets/ball.

As kids we used to play in the streets or in someones back garden with boxes and blankets chucked over them for nets !

And as we got older there were courts in the schools and in the local parks. There are certainly municipal courts around where I am.

But once you start getting into clubs and coaching I can believe that is very pricey.

But I would say that it is an accessible sport. If you want to play you can normally find a way fairly cheaply and it doesn't require any really expensive equipment.

I doubt though whether anyone every got really good at playing tennis with sponge balls with their mates in back gardens.