Portsmouth is getting its first dedicated padel centre. Padel Quarter opens on Saturday 19 September 2026 at Admiral Park, with six indoor courts, a cafe, a pro shop and a gym – the kind of full-service setup that until now you’d have had to drive to Fareham or Southampton to find anywhere near the city.
At a glance
Address: Units 1 and 2, Admiral Park, Portsmouth PO3 5RQ – across the road from Hilsea railway station
Opening date: Saturday 19 September 2026
Courts: 6 indoor courts
Facilities: Cafe, pro shop, gym/fitness studio
Pricing: £48/hour peak (weekends and 4pm-close weekdays), £36/hour off-peak – roughly £12 and £9 per player split four ways
Hours: 7am-10pm
Booking: book.padelquarter.net, or the Padel Mates app
Website: padelquarter.net
Portsmouth’s first dedicated venue
Until now, Portsmouth has been one of the more obvious gaps on the UK padel map – a city with a population well over 200,000 and no indoor courts of its own, while neighbouring Fareham and Southampton built out multi-court venues over the past couple of years. Our Portsmouth padel guide has tracked that gap since the spring – the closest option has been a short drive to Padel4all in Fareham. Padel Quarter closes it directly, and does so with a bigger opening than most first-in-city venues manage: six courts is a serious starting point, more than most cities get on day one.
The centre sits at Admiral Park, an industrial estate directly opposite Hilsea railway station, which puts it within easy reach by train from across the city and into Fareham and Cosham without needing a car. Six indoor courts means the site should hold up through the winter without the booking gaps that outdoor-only venues tend to see once the weather turns.
Who’s behind it
Padel Quarter is the project of Andrew Baxter, a 60-year-old former tennis and squash player who took up padel after persistent knee injuries made his previous sports harder to sustain. According to local press coverage, he found padel let him get a proper workout without the same physical toll, and that games tended to turn into a coffee or a drink afterwards – the social side that hooks a lot of new players. That’s the model he’s built the venue around: family-run, aimed at “all ages and abilities,” with junior programmes, social sessions and coaching planned once the doors open, alongside the standard mix of ladders, leagues and one-off events most new clubs use to build a regular crowd in the first few months.
Pricing and booking
Padel Quarter has published court pricing ahead of opening, which isn’t always the case for new venues – some launch and firm up rates in the weeks after. Peak hours (weekends, and 4pm to close on weekdays) run £48 per court per hour; off-peak drops to £36. Split across a four, that’s roughly £12 a head at peak and £9 off-peak, which sits at the higher end of what you’d pay in Fareham or Southampton but not out of line with newer indoor venues elsewhere in the south.
Bookings go through the venue’s own platform at book.padelquarter.net, or via the Padel Mates app – worth knowing if you’re used to Playtomic or ClubSpark from other local venues, since Padel Quarter isn’t using either. Hours are 7am to 10pm, which covers early risers and the after-work crowd without needing an extended late slot.
What this means for south coast players
Padel Quarter doesn’t erase the case for Fareham or Gosport – both remain useful options, and the Portsmouth guide still covers them in full – but it does change the maths for anyone based in the city itself. A six-court indoor venue on your doorstep, bookable from 7am, is a different proposition to a fifteen-minute drive out to Park Lane. For players in Southsea, Fratton or the north of the city who’ve been driving to Fareham twice a week, Admiral Park is likely to become the default rather than the backup.
It also puts Portsmouth roughly level with Southampton, twenty miles west along the M27, where three separate venues have opened over the past couple of years – PadelStars at Trojans, PADELHUB SO16, and David Lloyd’s members-only courts, all covered in our Southampton padel guide. Hampshire’s two biggest cities now both have proper indoor padel infrastructure, which says something about how fast the south coast scene has grown since 2024.
Six courts on day one is also a notably confident opening. Plenty of UK cities got their first dedicated padel venue with two or three courts and grew from there; Padel Quarter is starting at a scale some cities still haven’t reached after two or three years of incremental building. That matters for anyone hoping to book with friends on a Saturday morning – six courts gives far more headroom before the venue fills up than a smaller site would, and it means Padel Quarter can run box leagues, social mix-ins and coaching sessions alongside pay-and-play bookings without everything competing for the same slots. It suggests Baxter and his team are betting on demand that’s already there, given how many Portsmouth players have been making the trip to Fareham or Southampton to play somewhere.
We’ll update this piece if Padel Quarter confirms launch-week offers or amends pricing once bookings open.