David's Best Tips:

• Planning permission may not be required for building a grass court in your back yard.
• Allthough the stipulated area for a tennis court is 120 feet by 60 feet, 110 by 55 is adequate for most people and can shave thousands off the cost.
• Putting fencing only around the backs of the court saves money and is visually less intrusive.
• Cutting the corners off at 45 degrees doesn't effect play but instead is visually more pleasing and it also trickles the balls to the centre of the court behind the baseline.

Click Play Button Now to listen to our Tennis Court Conversation

So if you were to repeat your steps what sort of things would you do differently?

Well, I have learnt that the jealousies and envies of people are very restrictive to doing what you love. They are envious of somebody who has something that they haven’t got and to try to appease about six people all around the area that you want to change or I wanted to change would have been impossible to try and get them to try and agree. So I would have carried out the exercise of telling them and trying to make them understand what it was that I wanted to do, but I know that the envies and the jealousies of what they consider an upper crust game.

Yeah.

And it isn’t that but that’s what they make out, that it’s uppercrust to justify their attitude to it. So, what I learned from that experience I would never have won that battle of being able to say, “ The neighbours have approved it", I wouldn’t be able to do it.

Right.

And it’s made me very sad, but it made me a little wiser. I think it is the most beautiful noise or sound that you can ever hear but they might... the same people might call cricket nostalgic or the kicking of a football, but they chose to say that mine was Chinese water torture.

So they complained of noise problem... did they have a problem of the lights or was it just noise?

No they had a problem with everything because these are standard planning permission procedures. You have to have car parking, you have to have lights that don’t spill into other people's gardens, and you have to have a noise factor that isn’t objectionable. There are many, many things that go along. Now, my lights didn’t truthfully spill, the noise was beautiful, absolutely lovely, and I had car parking. But it’s what they say. And nothing you do... the same people might watch Wimbledon and love it – have their television on all day - but they don’t want it next door to them.

So your main problem sounds like it was the neighbours, and then that led to another problem of being restricted in your working hours. But do you think that will be the same for everybody, or is everybody going to have different sorts of problems? I mean how often do neighbours become a real pain with tennis courts?

Well, if they are next door neighbours... If you have distance between then you might get it, but nowadays it is much more difficult to get courts put up on your property, because there is one other thing you see. In changing the surface of the grass and you would have to do that if you wanted regular play. You are creating a principle that might lead towards saying the area’s suitable to put a house on.

Right, because it’s changing the land use?

Yeah, it’s changing the land use, it’s also going up more than three meters nearly always, So when you get a fence that’s three meters high shall we say? Around a tennis court. So the three metres constitute up to the eaves of a house... And lights can go up even higher and so you’re creating an outline shall we say of a house, albeit minimal and albeit that you don’t intend to.

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