National Squash Championships

The national championships are the quieter half of the city’s squash calendar: the same glass court as the international meeting, a domestic field, and defending champions who are named in the entry below.

Kept as published, including the external address the organisers used at the time. The court and its seating are described in the National Squash Centre record.

A glass court is a broadcast object before it is a sporting one. It exists so that a game played inside four walls can be watched from the outside, and a city that has gone to the expense of building one will put its domestic rounds on it to keep the thing in use between international meetings. That is the working economics of any purpose-built single-sport centre: the showpiece event pays for the court, and the ordinary weeks of the calendar are what justify having it at all. Read the entry that way and a short listing stops being a gap in the archive — it is the evidence that the venue was busy when nobody was filming. The same argument, applied to the rest of the city’s specialist venues, is in Grounds and venues.