Does Kirkby need padel like an elephant needs a boat?

How ‘Pride in Place‘ is shaping up in Kirkby as millions are earmarked for a new padel centre in the town

‘This isn’t about pet projects, it’s serious investment for the priorities of local people.’ That’s what communities secretary Steve Reed said last year about the government’s flagship Pride in Place scheme.

The £5 billion regeneration programme promises to put local communities, rather than central government, at the heart of deciding how nearly £20 million is spent in each selected town over the next decade.

Reed said ‘no one knows the priorities of the community better than the people who live there’, so they should be the ones ‘calling the shots on how funding is spent’.

What this means in reality is those decisions are taken by neighbourhood boards, bringing together community representatives alongside councils, MPs, businesses and other organisations.

But, as the scheme gathers pace across Merseyside, questions are beginning to emerge in some of the towns involved about what ‘community-led’ actually means in practice.

Kirkby is one of several Merseyside towns to benefit from Pride in Place. It is also one of the first where those questions are beginning to be asked.

Last month, the town’s neighbourhood board approved spending £2.5 million - around 13% of Kirkby’s ten-year allocation - on a new padel centre.

Today, Knowsley’s cabinet backed the wider £5 million scheme. As well as the £2.5 million already committed through Pride in Place, councillors were asked to approve a further £2m from council resources, including £1m of borrowing, with the local authority also contributing the development site itself, valued at around £500k.

As a result, Kirkby looks set to get a new 32,000 sq ft leisure building with six to eight padel courts, changing rooms, a café, social areas and community space, with hopes it will open in 2027.

If you haven’t heard of padel, you are not alone. A hybrid of sorts between squash and tennis played with a solid racquet, it is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world but has only recently begun to take off in the UK.

The decision has left some local councillors scratching their heads.

This includes independent Kirkby ward councillors Steve Smith and Brian Johns as well as fellow independent councillor David Hitchmough, who told the Monitor that while he has ‘quite enjoyed a game or two’ of padel and has nothing against the sport itself, ‘if you were to think of a sport associated with Kirkby, this isn’t it.’ He questioned whether a padel centre was really what local people wanted or needed.

Shortly after the plans were announced, Hitchmough asked residents for their views on social media. ‘I kept my question neutral because I really wanted to know what people in the community actually thought,’ he said.

While some people welcomed the investment as something positive for a town that has often struggled to attract new leisure facilities, others questioned whether spending £2.5 million on padel reflected local priorities, suggesting the money would be better spent on parks, football facilities, youth provision or other community infrastructure.

The Monitor went to Kirkby to find out whether those comments reflected opinion on the ground. We asked dozens of people in the town square what they thought about the plans. Some of the responses were, quite frankly, unpublishable.

With two exceptions, nobody we spoke to had even heard of padel. One resident laughed and said: ‘It’s like saying let’s put lacrosse in the middle of Kirkby.’

More strikingly, nobody we spoke to knew anything about the proposal itself, what Pride in Place was or that almost £20 million had been allocated to the town over the next decade.

One pensioner, who said he had lived in Kirkby since his youth, summed up a feeling we heard several times. ‘Things are done to Kirkby, not with us,’ he said, referring exactly to the problem the scheme is supposed to address.

Pointing around the town square, he questioned some of the public art and its connection to the town by way of example. ’That elephant has got nothing to do with us, and just look at that tree’ he said, gesturing towards a sculpture of a de-branched tree with what appears to be either a giant frisbee or UFO wedged in it. ‘It’s a copy of an old tree from Huyton not Kirkby,’ he added. The sculptures have been in place for many years and are not linked to Pride in Place funding.

He suggested instead the town centre would benefit more from statues of famous Kirkby footballers, reeling off a long list of suitable candidates, adding, ‘now that’s the sort of thing that would give us a bit of pride in the place.’

While these conversations only provide a snapshot of opinion of course, they do echo the concerns raised by Cllr Hitchmough and mentioned by commentators on his social media post. They also prompt a wider question about how decisions are actually being made under Pride in Place.

Residents were consulted on broad ambitions for Kirkby’s future, they were not asked whether they wanted a padel centre. So, if local communities are supposed to be ‘calling the shots’, how did a £2.5 million investment in a sport many residents had never heard of become the neighbourhood board’s biggest funding decision so far?

Knowsley Council says the process began with three rounds of public consultation between 2019 and 2025, involving online surveys, community events and targeted conversations around what residents wanted for the town. It said those consultations identified a desire for more leisure opportunities, facilities for young people and a more vibrant town centre, helping to shape Kirkby’s government-approved Regeneration and Investment Plan as part of the Pride in Place scheme.

The consultations identified the outcomes residents wanted to achieve but did not identify padel specifically. Instead, that came about after earlier plans for a cinema fell through, and council officers spent a year working with commercial property consultants Barker Proudlove to identify an alternative leisure use for the site.

According to the council, market testing found the strongest interest came from padel operators, reflecting growing demand for what it described as ‘active, social and experience-led leisure’ while also meeting residents’ calls for a leisure offer and supporting health and wellbeing.

Officers then recommended the proposal to the Pride in Place neighbourhood board, which Knowsley Council says is made up predominantly of local representatives alongside members from businesses and public bodies, and is chaired by former Liverpool Vision chief executive Max Steinberg.

Officers argued the scheme would increase footfall, improve health and wellbeing and support the wider regeneration of Kirkby town centre. In a press release announcing the decision a few weeks ago, Steinberg said board members had been ‘impressed’ by the market testing carried out by the council and unanimously approved the £2.5 million investment.

Whether this process amounts to local people ‘calling the shots’, as ministers have described Pride in Place should be, or is more of a model in which selected community representatives approve proposals developed by councils and consultants, is likely to be a matter of opinion. 

In any case, residents will be hearing much more about padel in the coming months as the sport looks set to arrive in Kirkby soon. It’s also likely this won’t be the last we’ll hear about how local community-led decision making is being applied in Pride in Place boards, not just in Kirkby but across other parts of Merseyside too.

As David put it: ‘The elephant in the room is how many times people are told we’re at the heart of decisions and then we end up with something we neither asked for or wanted. Padel feels like just more of the same.’

before you go book that padel court …

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