Behind the Red Brick
On Blackfriars Road, just across the River Irwell from Manchester Cathedral, there is a red brick building that most people walk past without a second look. It could be a warehouse. It could be offices. It could be anything. There is nothing about its exterior that suggests what is inside.
Inside is one of the most remarkable sporting clubs in England. The Manchester Tennis and Racquet Club has been here since 1880, and it contains something that fewer than 30 buildings in the entire country can claim: a Real Tennis court. Not lawn tennis, which is the game most people mean when they say tennis. Real Tennis. The original game. The one that Henry VIII played. The one that has been played in Europe since the medieval period, with sloping roofs called penthouses, asymmetrical courts, and rules so complex that it takes years to fully understand them.
The Game Before the Game
Real Tennis is the ancestor of almost every racquet sport in existence. Lawn tennis, squash, rackets, table tennis - all of them trace their lineage back to the game that was played in French monastery courtyards in the 12th and 13th centuries. Players originally hit the ball with the palm of their hand. The French called it jeu de paume - the game of the palm. Racquets came later.
By the 16th century, Real Tennis was the sport of European royalty. Henry VIII was an enthusiastic player. A court was first built at Hampton Court Palace in the 1520s, though the present Royal Tennis Court dates from about 1625. The oldest surviving real tennis court still in use is at Falkland Palace in Fife, built in 1539. The game requires a purpose-built court with walls, galleries, a sloping penthouse roof, and openings called dedans, grilles, and winning galleries. No two courts are identical. The balls are handmade. The racquets are asymmetrical and strung with heavy gut.
It is, by any measure, an eccentric and magnificent sport. And Manchester has one of the few places in the north of England where you can play it.
Cotton Money and Racquet Sports
The club was founded in 1876 by a group of Manchester businessmen, initially at Miller Street before moving to the purpose-built Blackfriars Road building which opened in December 1880. Many of them were, many of them from the cotton trade, who wanted somewhere to play racquet sports in the city. Manchester was at the peak of its power as the world's cotton capital, and the men who ran the industry had money, leisure time, and a taste for the kind of sports that their London counterparts enjoyed.
The building was designed to house both a Real Tennis court and a rackets court. Rackets, a game played in an enclosed court with a hard ball, had originated in the debtors' prisons of London in the 18th century before being adopted by public schools and gentlemen's clubs. The Manchester club offered both games under one roof, along with a bowling alley, a bar, dining facilities, and the kind of oak-panelled clubhouse atmosphere that made Victorian gentlemen feel at home.
The interior is a time capsule. Mounted stag heads on the walls. A wooden skittle alley. Trophies and photographs spanning over 140 years. The Real Tennis court itself is a cathedral of a room: high-ceilinged, gallery-lined, and built to specifications that have barely changed since the Renaissance. Standing on the court is like stepping into a different century.
"Most people have walked past this building a thousand times and never once wondered what's inside."
Survival
The club has survived two world wars, the decline of the cotton industry, the transformation of Salford from industrial heartland to MediaCity, and the steady disappearance of the kind of Victorian institutions that once defined Manchester's civic life. Many similar clubs across the country closed in the 20th century. The Manchester Tennis and Racquet Club did not.
It remains a private members' club, though it is more accessible than its Victorian origins might suggest. New members are welcomed. Coaching is available. You do not need to have grown up playing Real Tennis or to know the difference between a chase and a hazard before you walk through the door. The club actively encourages beginners, which is fortunate, because there are not many places left in the world where you can learn.
The Grade II* listing recognises the building's architectural and historical significance. It is one of the finest surviving examples of a purpose-built Victorian sporting club in England. The fact that it is still in use, still functioning as the thing it was built to be, makes it rarer still. Most Grade II* buildings are museums or offices. This one is a place where people still play a 500-year-old sport every week.
Still Playing
There are approximately 45 Real Tennis courts in the world. About half of them are in Britain. The Manchester club's court is one of the finest, and it sits behind an unremarkable red brick wall on a road that most people only use to get somewhere else.
That's what makes it a Hidden Manchester entry. Not because it's obscure, but because it's invisible. It has been here for nearly 150 years, doing what it was always meant to do, and the vast majority of Mancunians have never set foot inside. They've never seen the Real Tennis court. They've never seen the stag heads or the skittle alley or the oak panelling. They've driven past it on the way to the Arndale and never given it a thought.
A medieval sport played in a Victorian building in a 21st-century city. Manchester has always been good at holding onto things that matter, even when nobody's looking.