Winner of the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize 2015- from the British Society for activities History.

From its creation within the mid-late 19th century as a garden-party hobby to its improvement right into a hugely commercialised and professionalised high-performance recreation, the historical past of tennis in Britain displays vital topics in Britain’s social heritage. within the first accomplished and demanding account of the historical past of tennis in Britain, Robert Lake explains how the game’s old roots have formed its modern constitution, and the way the background of tennis can let us know a lot concerning the historical past of wider British society.

Since its emergence as a spare-time diversion for landed elites, the dominant tradition in British tennis has been certainly one of amateurism and exclusion, with tennis sitting along cricket and golfing as a motor vehicle for the replica of middle-class values all through wider British society within the 20th and twenty-first centuries. for this reason, the garden Tennis organization has been accused of a failure to advertise inclusion or widen participation, regardless of steadfast efforts to improve expertise and enhance training practices and constructions. Robert Lake examines those issues within the context of the worldwide improvement of tennis and critical approaches of commercialisation and social improvement that experience formed either tennis and wider society.

The social historical past of tennis in Britain is a microcosm of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century British social background: sustained classification strength and sophistication clash; struggles for woman emancipation and racial integration; the decline of empire; and, Britain’s transferring courting with the USA, continental Europe, and Commonwealth international locations. This ebook is necessary and interesting examining for anyone with an curiosity within the heritage of recreation or British social history.