The Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum is open every day of the year apart from published closure dates, and a museum ticket includes a 15-minute accompanied visit to Centre Court. Adult entry to the museum alone is £20; the museum with the 90-minute guided tour of the Grounds costs £28 or £32 depending on which page of the All England Club's own website you read. Out of season the place is nearly empty, and the emptiness is the point.
Almost everything written about Wimbledon is about the fortnight. This page is about the other fifty weeks, when you can walk into the Grounds from a suburban street, look down at a Centre Court with no net up and no crowd in it, and be back at Southfields station within two hours. Our guide to Wimbledon tickets and the Queue covers the tournament itself, and stadium tours in London sets this one beside Wembley, Lord's and the football grounds.
The museum is inside the Grounds, entered from Gate 4 on Church Road. That matters for the one date range where none of the above applies, which is dealt with below.
Museum and tour: the practical frame
- Entrance
- Gate 4, Church Road, London SW19 5AG
- Open
- Daily. April to September 10:00–17:30, last entry 16:30; October to March 10:00–17:00, last entry 16:00
- Museum only
- Adult £20, concession (seniors and students 16+) £17, child 5–15 £10, under-5 free
- Museum and Tour
- Adult £32, concession £28, child £22 on the club's Museum & Tour page; £28 / £24.50 / £19.25 on its Plan Your Visit page (see below)
- Tour length
- 90 minutes, led by a Blue Badge Guide
- Centre Court
- 15-minute accompanied visit, included with any museum ticket
- Nearest station
- Southfields (District line), 15 minutes' walk; bus 493 stops outside Gate 4
- Booking
- The club asks you to pre-book to guarantee a time slot
The price the club publishes twice
The museum-only prices are consistent wherever you look: £20 for an adult, £17 concession, £10 for a child of 5 to 15, free under five, and free for Museums Association members. The combined Museum and Tour price is not. The club's Museum & Tour landing page lists £32 for an adult, £28 concession and £22 for a child. Its Plan Your Visit page lists the summer rates set during the temporary reduced VAT period from 25 June to 1 September - £28, £24.50 and £19.25 - and then says that from 2 September "the prices remain as shown".
We are not going to guess which is right. Book on the club's own booking page, where the figure you are charged is the one that counts, and expect somewhere between £28 and £32 for an adult. Carers come free but still need a pre-booked ticket.
Two adults and two children should decide about the tour before they book. Museum-only for that group is £60. Adding the tour takes it to between £94.50 and £108, for ninety minutes of walking outdoors with a guide. With children under about ten, buy museum-only and use the Centre Court visit that comes with it.
Photo: Gabinho · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · resized
The Centre Court visit, and the six times it leaves
This is the part most people do not realise is included. Every museum ticket carries a short visit to Centre Court, fifteen minutes, accompanied by a member of the museum's own team rather than a tour guide. The visits leave from outside the Wimbledon Shop at 10.45am, 11.45am, 12.45pm, 1.45pm, 2.45pm and 4pm. There is no 3.45pm departure, which is the gap that catches out anyone arriving mid-afternoon in winter, when the last entry is 4pm.
Fifteen minutes is enough. You are taken to a viewing position, not onto the grass, and what you get is the scale of the bowl and the strange quiet of it. In February the roof may be closed and the court may be bare soil or fresh seed rather than the green you expect from television; the grass is renewed each year, and in the off-season it looks like a garden project.
What the 90-minute tour adds
The tour of the Grounds is led by a Blue Badge Guide - the qualification is a real one, and it shows. It takes in the facilities built for players, press and broadcasters, and how the courts are prepared and the site rebuilt a piece at a time each year. Every area is subject to availability, which in practice means the route changes when courts are being worked on, so two people who do the tour in different months will not see the same things.
It is worth the extra money if you are a tennis follower, and less so if you are not, because the buildings are functional rather than beautiful and there is a lot of walking on a sloping site. Private groups can be booked in advance and the club offers tours in other languages on request, by telephone rather than online.
Inside the museum: the trophies and the dressing-room bench
The collection runs to more than 50,000 objects, and the museum's job is to get from lawn tennis as a Victorian garden pastime to the modern tournament. The famous trophies are displayed where you can get close to them. There is a case of tennis clothing from the 1870s onwards with fabrics you are allowed to touch, which does more to explain what playing in a corset meant than any caption could.
The permanent Open-era gallery is the strongest part. You can sit on the bench Roger Federer used in the Gentlemen's Dressing Room, turn the pages of Arthur Ashe's diary, and stand in front of a display on Martina Navratilova's game. There is a Batak reaction wall for anyone who wants to find out how slow they are, which is the one thing in the building that children queue for. A separate exhibition, A Slice of History, covers the food of the Championships, from strawberries and cream on the Tea Lawn to the evolution of what players eat.
Free audio guides are available at the ticket desk. Allow about an hour and a quarter for the museum and Centre Court together, or two and three-quarter hours if you have added the tour.
The fortnight when none of this works normally
The museum stands inside the Grounds and the tour crosses ground that is in use when matches are being played, so the ordinary arrangement cannot apply during The Championships, which in 2027 run from 28 June to 11 July. The club's own pages say only that closure dates are subject to change and tell visitors to check the booking page or telephone the museum. They publish no separate Championships-fortnight arrangement for the museum or the tour.
So if your trip falls inside the tournament, do not plan a museum visit and then find out: ring first. If it falls in the week before, the Qualifying Competition is held at a different site altogether, which our Wimbledon tickets guide explains.
Late autumn and winter is when this museum is best, and when it closes earliest. From October to March the doors shut at 5pm and the last entry is 4pm, which in December means arriving in the dark and leaving in the dark. Come at opening time instead: you will have the Open-era gallery more or less to yourself, and the 10.45am Centre Court visit is the least crowded of the day. The same logic runs through our guide to avoiding the crowds in London.
Getting to Church Road
Three District line stations serve the Grounds and none of them is close. Southfields is the standard choice, about fifteen minutes on foot. Wimbledon, which also has National Rail trains and the tram, is about twenty minutes. Wimbledon Park is about twenty-five. Our guide to the District and Circle lines covers the journey out, which is longer than most visitors expect from a zone 3 destination.
The better answer for most people is the bus. Route 493 links Wimbledon station and Southfields station to the museum, and the stop - called Wimbledon Tennis Club and Museum - is immediately outside Gate 4. The club notes that the 493 often runs as a single-decker and is mostly wheelchair accessible. During The Championships the 493 is diverted and a dedicated service runs from Wimbledon station instead.
Step-free, with one honest caveat
The museum and the shop have step-free access, the Gate 4 entrance is step-free, and the museum itself is reached by stairs or a lift down to the floor below. Seating is provided through the galleries and the displays are set at heights that work from a wheelchair. Accessible toilets are in the Wimbledon Shop, and there is an induction loop at the ticket desk and in the café, with portable T loops for the audio guides.
The tour is the harder question, and the club's own pages pull in two directions: one passage says level-access routes have been arranged throughout, another says the route "includes many steps which some might find challenging", and both warn that the surfacing is loose in places because the site is on a hill. Ninety minutes of that is a lot. Ring the museum before booking if it matters, and see our guides to accessible London and step-free transport for the rest of the journey. British Sign Language tours run on scheduled dates, arranged directly with the museum, and the club publishes visual stories for both the museum and the tour.
Certified assistance dogs are welcome in the museum and on the tour, with designated spending areas at The Orchard at the top of the Hill and at the Pergola.
What to do with the rest of the day
The museum does not fill one. Wimbledon Village and town is a ten-minute walk uphill from Church Road and has the pubs and the shops; Wimbledon Common and Putney Heath begin at the top of the village and are big enough to lose an afternoon in. The windmill on the common is a separate small museum with limited opening days.
If you are working through London's sporting institutions, the Lord's tour and the MCC Museum is the closest equivalent and the better building, cricket at Lord's and The Oval covers watching a match rather than touring, and rugby at Twickenham deals with the third of the three. For deciding what to reserve before you fly, see what to book before you go.
Frequently asked questions
Can you go on Centre Court at Wimbledon?
You can visit it, accompanied, for fifteen minutes, and that visit is included with any museum ticket. Visits leave from outside the Wimbledon Shop at 10.45am, 11.45am, 12.45pm, 1.45pm, 2.45pm and 4pm. You are taken to a viewing position rather than onto the grass, and the court itself is renewed each year, so out of season it may not be green.
How much is the Wimbledon museum?
Museum only: £20 for an adult, £17 concession, £10 for a child aged 5 to 15, free under five. The combined Museum and Tour ticket is listed at £32 for an adult on one of the club's pages and £28 on another, so check the price at the point of booking. Carers are free but need a ticket.
Is the Wimbledon museum open all year?
The museum and the Wimbledon Shop are open daily except on published closure dates, from 10am to 5.30pm between April and September and 10am to 5pm between October and March. The club says closure dates are subject to change and asks visitors to check its booking page or telephone the museum, and it publishes no separate arrangement for The Championships fortnight.
How long does the museum and tour take?
About an hour and a quarter for the museum and the Centre Court visit. The guided tour of the Grounds adds ninety minutes on top, so a combined ticket is close to three hours including the walk from the station.
Which station is nearest?
Southfields on the District line, about fifteen minutes' walk. Wimbledon is about twenty minutes and Wimbledon Park about twenty-five. The 493 bus runs from both Wimbledon and Southfields stations and stops immediately outside Gate 4, which is the museum entrance.
Sources
- All England Lawn Tennis Club - Museum & Tours (opening times and prices) (checked September 2026)
- AELTC - Plan Your Visit (opening times, prices, Gate 4) (checked September 2026)
- AELTC - What to See (Centre Court visit times, the Tour, the galleries) (checked September 2026)
- AELTC - Museum & Tour Accessibility (checked September 2026)
- AELTC - Getting Here (stations, walking times, bus 493) (checked September 2026)
- AELTC - The Championships 2027 dates (checked September 2026)