Padel courts, North West

The challenge

An operator wanted to put three padel courts on existing hardstanding in a car park, open from seven in the morning until ten at night, with homes nearby.

Padel has a genuine acoustic problem: there is no British Standard for assessing it, and the council publishes nothing for sports facilities either. That vacuum has produced real inconsistency between consultants, and an application can founder on the method long before anyone argues about the numbers.

It is also not tennis. The court is smaller and partly enclosed, the ball comes off the glass and the walls as well as the racket, and the sound is sharper and more staccato, which is exactly the character people notice.

What we did

The first job was to fix a defensible framework, before producing a single number. We used the established environmental assessment guidance, which asks a sensible question: how much does the overall sound level at someone's home actually change? A change of about 3 dB is the smallest most people can detect at all, so that became the test.

We monitored for four days including a full weekend, splitting the results into weekday, Saturday and Sunday, and daytime and evening. Sunday evening is the quietest, and therefore the hardest case for the courts to pass.

Source levels came from measurements published for comparable padel facilities. Padel noise is directional, and these courts face the neighbours with their glazed ends rather than their open sides, so we used the figure for that orientation.

Then we stacked the assumptions against the scheme: all three courts in continuous use at once, no credit for screening anywhere except one building that genuinely blocks the view, and everything compared against the quietest baseline we recorded rather than a typical one.