Liverpool star Trent Alexander-Arnold has won a planning war, meaning he can keep the £50,000 padel tennis court he built at his £5million mansion.
Alexander-Arnold, who bought the house from Raheem Sterling when he left Manchester City for Chelsea in 2022, built the court in his garden without getting permission from the local parish council.
Concerns about the noise and the impact the court could have on the nearby countryside prompted council officials to investigate and Alexander-Arnold could have been forced to demolish the court.
However, the defender has now been granted retrospective permission to keep the court as long as he agrees to remove four floodlights to “prevent light pollution”.
Alexander-Arnold has been linked with a move away from Liverpool as he enters the final year of his contract, with Real Madrid interested in signing him, but the battle suggests he may not be going anywhere after going to so much trouble to keep the court which was built two years ago.
In this instance the site is well enclosed by substantial existing boundary planting to the north, south and west, so is screened from public vantage points in all directions,” the case officer said. “Therefore the physical encroachment into the open countryside would be visually contained inside the site with no external viewing.
The size of the panel court is also not considered to be excessively large for private use with a footprint of 130sqm and predominant height of 3m and a maximum height of 4m for the side panels which consists of a light weight mesh above. The black colour also helps the proposal to blend in with the existing boundary treatment.
Therefore given the relatively small scale nature of the proposal and its screening from public vantage points, it is not considered that the proposal would cause unacceptable harm to the character and appearance of the surrounding area or the wider open countryside.
The proposal for private use and its limited size is also not considered to cause significant harm to amenity through noise/disturbance and is not considered to be significantly different in these terms to other sport/recreational uses usually found within the open countryside.
Alexander-Arnold has also hired landscapers to plant trees and hedges to provide screening for the court, with the council ruling that the environmental impacts of the build are “relatively low”.
