On Saturday 14 March, Padium opens in Cardiff Bay. Eight indoor courts, 35,000 square feet, a spa with ice baths and sauna, a bar with a DJ booth, and a co-working space. It is, without question, the most ambitious padel venue Wales has seen.

Whether you’re in Cardiff or within driving distance, this is worth knowing about.

What Padium is

Padium launched at Canary Wharf in September 2023 and quickly became the benchmark for premium padel in the UK. It’s backed by Martin Lorenzen – co-founder of Spotify – and founded by Houman Ashrafzadeh, whose stated ambition from day one was to build a padel brand that could sit alongside the best sports clubs in the country, not just the best padel clubs.

The Canary Wharf site set a template: tournament-standard courts, a proper bar, coaching programmes, luxury changing rooms. Within six months of opening, 5,000 people had played there. The waiting lists for court time became a regular feature. Plans for a second location had been in the works for some time.

Cardiff is where they landed first.

What the Cardiff venue offers

The site is in Cardiff Bay Retail Park, in a former Argos unit that has been stripped out and rebuilt as a padel facility. The scale is significant: 35,000 square feet across eight indoor courts.

The courts are AFP panoramic design with Mondo turf – the same surface specification you’d find at a serious club in Madrid or Barcelona. If you want to understand why panoramic courts play differently from standard-glass ones, how UK padel courts are built explains the structural differences that affect the game. Year-round indoor play means no weather-dependent cancellations, no outdoor courts turning to puddles in March.

Beyond the courts, the Cardiff venue offers:

  • Players’ lounge and co-working space – you can book a court, work a few hours beforehand, and not have to leave the building
  • Ace Bar – serving food, juices, smoothies, and alcohol, with a DJ booth that suggests Padium are thinking about post-match socialising as seriously as the padel itself
  • Wellness area – sauna, two ice baths, and exercise bikes
  • Pro shop – equipped with Babolat, Wilson, and Adidas
  • Coaching – programmes aimed at beginners and intermediate players

Peak court hire is £70 per session. Off-peak is £60. Membership packages bring those figures down. For comparison, decent indoor court time in London runs at similar rates. For Cardiff, it’s a new ceiling.

What came before

Cardiff has had padel for a few years, but nothing at this scale.

The existing options were – and still are – relatively modest. House of Sport has six courts. Game4Padel has a court at Windsor Penarth. Smash Padel has been operating at Llandaff Fields with canopy-covered outdoor courts and a good community around them. Cardiff University’s padel club has been growing steadily and currently runs multiple squads in the National University Padel League. Tennis Wales has been actively pushing the sport, including an all-female training session at Smash Padel just this week to mark International Women’s Day.

So it’s not that padel didn’t exist in Cardiff before Padium. It existed. But it existed at a scale that suited a sport still finding its feet. Outdoor and semi-outdoor courts, community clubs, a growing university scene. What didn’t exist was a dedicated premium indoor venue – somewhere you could book a court in December without checking the weather forecast first.

Padium fills that gap. Whether the demand in Cardiff can sustain eight courts at London prices is a fair question, but the Canary Wharf experience suggests Padium know how to build and retain a membership base. If you’re thinking about joining and want to know what to look for before committing to a membership, the how to choose a padel club guide runs through the questions worth asking first.

Bigger than one venue

Padium Cardiff isn’t just a new place to play. It’s a statement about where UK padel is going.

When a London-based premium brand backed by serious money makes its first expansion and picks Wales – not Manchester, not Birmingham, not another London postcode – that tells you something about how they read demand. Cardiff Bay is also mid-redevelopment: a 15,000-capacity indoor arena is being built nearby, and the area is being repositioned as a leisure destination. Padium is part of that story.

For the sport more broadly, this kind of venue matters. The barrier to picking up padel has always been court availability. In London, that problem is mostly solved – courts everywhere, multiple price points, plenty of beginner-friendly clubs. Outside London, the picture is patchier. A venue like this, with a coaching programme and beginner-friendly entry points, can convert a lot of curious people into regular players.

Ashrafzadeh’s view is direct: “The demand for high quality padel facilities in Wales is at an all-time high and we’re excited to introduce our premium offering to this vibrant sporting city.”

That reads like a press release, but the underlying point holds. There is a cohort of people in Cardiff – tennis players, squash players, gym-goers, people who’ve played padel on holiday in Spain – who have been waiting for somewhere worth playing regularly. Padium is betting they’ll turn up.

How to Book

The Cardiff venue opens Saturday 14 March. Courts are bookable at padium.com/cardiff. Peak sessions are £70 per court, off-peak £60. Coaching sessions are available for beginners and those looking to develop their game. Membership rates are available on request.

The venue is at Cardiff Bay Retail Park – accessible from the bay area and with parking on-site. For the full picture of padel in Cardiff – including Smash Padel at Llandaff Fields and Cardiff City House of Sport – the Cardiff padel guide covers every venue, what each costs, and how they compare.

If you’re travelling from elsewhere in Wales or the west of England, this is worth a trip. Eight indoor courts at this standard doesn’t exist anywhere between London and Manchester.