The club was founded in either 1887 or 1888, with the first contemporary record being a newspaper advertisement from April 1889 informing local people that the ground would be open for play from 4 May and listing the membership categories and rates. We do not know where the club was based in these early years. But it was one of the first tennis clubs and first bowls clubs in north London and, as far as we are aware, is now the oldest surviving bowls club in the area.
Early Years
The club was founded as “Bounds Green Lawn Tennis and Bowling Club”, but it seems that the two sides of the club parted company around 1890, with a tennis section being re-established some ten years later. In the meantime, the bowls club had moved to its current address by at least 1898 and very probably around 1894, if not earlier, before any of the surrounding roads had been developed. The club bought the grounds from the owners of the Broomfield estate in 1903 for £1,000. At that time, there was a bowls green and “bowls house”, five grass tennis courts and a small tennis pavilion, plus a small croquet lawn (where the “allotment” and adjoining part of the car park are now).
The club was instrumental in founding the London & Southern Counties Bowling Association in 1895 and won the Association’s Shield in 1897, the competition’s first year. The club went on to win the Shield four times in total and appear in six other finals by 1914, making Bounds Green arguably the leading bowls club in the south of England in that period.
The club continued in much the same way for the next 35 years, albeit with less success in external bowls competitions, as the game increased in popularity and many more clubs were founded. The only obvious change to the appearance of the club was the re-laying of two of the grass courts as red shale courts in the late 1920s.
New buildings
Then in 1938 the club took the momentous decision to build an indoor green, which also provided for extensive general club facilities on the ground floor, including a bar, billiards room, card room and function hall. The new building cost some £5,000 – a major gamble by the club’s shareholders, given that annual revenue at this time was under £1,000. The clubhouse was built amazingly quickly by modern standards. Construction started in August and the green was available for play by 5 December. The croquet section was wound up at this time and it seems that the fifth court – perpendicular to the ends of courts 1 and 2 – went out of use around the same time.
The new clubhouse and indoor green were a big success and the bowls membership thrived, even during the War. The clubhouse roof suffered minor damage during the Blitz, but we were lucky to avoid anything more serious. The club prospered in the decades after 1945. The two remaining grass courts were re-laid as “grey-green” hard courts in 1948 and a house on Goring Road bought as the groundsman’s house in the same year. The outdoor bowls green was re-laid after the 1949 season.
Ladies come and go
1971 was a particularly important year in the club’s history. The bowls section had been men-only to this date, but in 1971 ladies were allowed to join as bowls members for the first time and they rapidly established themselves. The club’s most successful ever bowler was Eileen Logan, who won many honours, including the English singles championship in 1978 and then the British Isles championship (for the previous year’s national champions of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland) in 1979. On the other side, the tennis section had been open to ladies since the club was established, but in 1971 almost all the lady tennis members left the club en bloc, feeling that they were not getting a fair deal from their male colleagues.
Bowls up; tennis down
The 1970s and early 1980s saw the fortunes of the bowls and tennis sections diverge dramatically. The bowls section grew to some 300 members by 1986, with the indoor green being played with four narrow rinks, rather than the three it had been designed for, in order to accommodate so many players. In 1988 the club won its tenth London & Southern Counties Shield, taking it to ten wins in the Association’s most prestigious competition, a record it currently shares with Paddington. The club has also been runner up seven times, equal first with North London. In 1985 the club was made a life member of the Association in recognition of its role in founding the L&SC and its accomplishments in the sport.
On the other side, tennis section numbers dropped below 40 members for much of this period, with no ladies’ section, no juniors and no coaching. The courts were often in poor condition. In 1983 the clubhouse was extended in order to lengthen the indoor bowls green, which was below the length needed for representative matches. But the works damaged the fourth tennis court, which had been parallel to court 3 in what is now the car park, and the club board concluded that it was not viable to re-lay it.
Fortunes change
At this point, the future of the tennis section was in jeopardy. But between 1986 and 1989 the club board invested in re-laying the remaining three courts and adding floodlights, presaging a revival on the tennis side in the late-‘80s and 1990s, as a ladies’ section was re-established in 1987, juniors rejoined the club, coaching resumed and the men’s first team almost reached the premier division of the Middlesex League in 1996.
Meanwhile, the bowls membership started to fall, reflecting a wider decline in the popularity of the sport which caused many clubs in Middlesex to close down. By the late 2000s the tennis side was also struggling for members, despite the current all-weather carpet being laid in 2003.
Nevertheless, the club managed to survive these difficult times, with the bowls membership stabilising and tennis membership reaching record levels during the “Covid boom”. In 2022 the club replaced the old tennis pavilion with a new building which is leased out to a club member and run as a health and fitness studio.
Tremendous legacy
The club’s ability to survive for over 130 years is entirely dependent on the work of the many volunteers over the years who established the club, bought the current site, built and then extended the clubhouse and now run the club and maintain its facilities. The current membership are fortunate that our forebears left us such a tremendous legacy, one which we must safeguard, build on and pass down to future generations.
Written by club secretary Michael Dawson 2025
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