The Archery: Edgbaston's hidden club with a claim to tennis history

Tucked beside Birmingham Botanical Gardens is a club with a very special place in sporting history. The Edgbaston Archery and Lawn Tennis Society, known affectionately as The Archery, is described as the oldest lawn tennis club in the world.

It began, as the name suggests, with bows and arrows. The Edgbaston Archery Society was founded in 1860 after meetings at the Birmingham and Midland Institute and the Old Library on Union Street. Its first grounds were on Hall Hill Road, now Edgbaston Park Road, and in 1867 it moved to its current home next to the Botanical Gardens. Croquet arrived from 1870.

Tennis followed soon after, and the reason lies just down the road. Between 1859 and 1865, solicitor Harry Gem and his friend Augurio Perera, a Spanish merchant living in Edgbaston, developed a new outdoor game on the croquet lawn of Perera's home, Fairlight, at 8 Ampton Road. Blending rackets with the Basque game of pelota, it was first called lawn rackets or lawn pelota before becoming lawn tennis.

Their game was played on a rectangular grass court, closer to modern tennis than the hourglass-shaped court of Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, who is traditionally credited with inventing the sport. Gem and Perera later moved to Leamington Spa, where they helped found the Leamington Club in 1874, often described as the world's first tennis club.

Gem was himself a member of the Edgbaston Archery Society from 1864 to 1867. There is no proof he brought the game to the club, but its fixture card from 1875 shows that tennis was already well established there, which is why The Archery is regarded as the oldest surviving tennis club. In 1877 the society changed its name to the Edgbaston Archery and Lawn Tennis Society.

More than 150 years after that fixture card, it is a delight that this piece of tennis history is still in use, a short walk from the lawns where Gem and Perera first knocked a ball about.

For anyone who loves the game, it is a lovely reminder that Birmingham has a strong claim to being one of the birthplaces of lawn tennis.

Next time you wander past the Botanical Gardens, spare a thought for the quiet lawns next door, where a remarkable chapter of sporting history is still being written.