How to Find a Tennis Court in London Using Claude or ChatGPT

You can search every London tennis court — across all 30+ borough ClubSpark instances, plus the LTA-affiliated independents and Premier Tennis venues — using Claude or ChatGPT. Connect LayUp's Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, ask in plain English for the court, time, and price you want, and the assistant returns a unified list with direct booking links to the right ClubSpark sub-site or operator page.

This is the fix for the most annoying part of London tennis booking: every borough has its own ClubSpark instance, with a different URL, different prices, and different release rules. Comparing manually means opening 30 tabs. The MCP connector collapses that into one chat prompt.

Why London tennis is hard to search

The LTA distributes its booking infrastructure through ClubSpark, but every borough or club runs its own subdomain — clubspark.lta.org.uk/AlbanyPark, clubspark.lta.org.uk/ClissoldPark, clubspark.lta.org.uk/HighburyFields, and on and on. There are roughly 48,000 LTA-bookable tennis slots in any given week across London, but they're scattered across dozens of separate booking sites that don't share inventory, don't share search, and don't share pricing.

Add to that:

Premier Tennis — Highbury Fields, Lincoln's Inn Fields, Paddington Recreation Ground, Hackney Marshes and around 30 other venues — runs on its own platform via the OpenActive Open Booking ecosystem. Roughly 1,600 slots a week.
Independent venues — many private clubs use their own systems entirely.
Pricing varies wildly. Council park courts are often £6/hour. Premium venues hit £15-25/hour. Members get different rates.
Indoor vs outdoor matters more here than in any other sport — winter outdoor play is brutal, so indoor slots get fought over.

A search like "find me a tennis court near Clapham Saturday morning under £10" spans potentially 5+ ClubSpark instances and 1-2 Premier Tennis venues. Manually checking each is tedious; asking your AI assistant takes 5 seconds.

Set it up in 60 seconds

Claude (claude.ai)

Open Settings → Connectors.
Click Add custom connector.
Paste this URL: https://mcp.layupsport.com
Save. The three tools (search_slots, list_sports, get_venue) appear automatically.

Available on Claude Pro, Team, and Enterprise plans. No LayUp account required.

ChatGPT

Enable Developer mode in Settings, add a new custom MCP server with the same URL, start a chat.

Cursor, Cline, Continue, or any MCP-capable client

Add this entry to your mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "layup": {
      "url": "https://mcp.layupsport.com"
    }
  }
}

The same install reference lives at app.layupsport.com/connect.

What to ask for tennis specifically

The MCP server's tools are sport-agnostic, but a few prompts tailor cleanly to the tennis-specific pain points:

1. Find a court for a specific time window

"Find me a tennis court near Clapham this Saturday between 9am and 12pm under £10."

Maps to search_slots({sport: "Tennis", area: "Clapham", date_from: "Saturday", time_from: "09:00", time_to: "12:00", max_price: 10}). The assistant returns slots from every relevant ClubSpark instance (Clapham Common, Battersea Park, etc.) ranked by start time.

2. Sweep a wider area for cheap morning slots

"What tennis is available across South London for under £8 this week, morning slots only?"

The free-text area filter matches council ILIKE '%South%' and venue slugs containing "south" — useful for "I'll drive anywhere within reason" prompts. Combine with time_to: "11:00" for morning-only.

3. Premium / indoor focus

"Find indoor tennis near central London for Friday evening, willing to pay up to £25."

The max_price: 25 cap drops park courts; Premier Tennis indoor venues, private clubs (where LayUp has them), and any premium ClubSpark venues come through.

4. Drill into one venue's full schedule

"What's on at Highbury Fields tennis this week?"

The assistant calls get_venue with the venue_slug from a prior result — useful when you've found a venue you like and want to see all its upcoming availability without re-searching.

5. Compare areas side by side

"Compare tennis availability and prices in Islington vs Hackney for next weekend."

The assistant runs two searches and presents the difference. Particularly useful when you're choosing between boroughs.

What it does and doesn't do

Being explicit about the boundaries:

The assistant CAN:

Search across every ClubSpark instance, Premier Tennis, and other LTA-affiliated venues in LayUp's dataset.
Filter by time window down to the hour, price ceiling, and area.
Return London-local times, the slot's price, and the exact ClubSpark / Premier Tennis URL to book.
Drill into a single venue's full upcoming schedule.

The assistant CAN'T (today):

Book on your behalf. You sign in on ClubSpark or Premier Tennis directly and pay there.
Tell you whether courts are indoor or outdoor as a filter. That info is on the venue page, not the slot record — though you can ask the assistant to surface it from activity_name and venue name, which often signals "indoor".
Tell you whether the court has lights for evening play in winter. Same constraint as above — slot-level data is time/price/spaces, not surface characteristics.
Filter by membership tier pricing. Some ClubSpark sites surface members-only rates; the public feed shows the standard rate.
Find courts outside London. LayUp's dataset is London-only.

The "find then click through" pattern is the genuine value here — once you're on the ClubSpark booking page for the right venue, that flow is fine. The pain LayUp's MCP removes is the "which of 30 ClubSpark sites should I even check" problem.

Tips for sharper tennis searches

A few prompting patterns specifically for tennis:

State time as a window, not a point. "Saturday morning" is fine; "Saturday at 10am" tends to return slots adjacent to 10am, not just exactly-at-10. Pair time_from + time_to for a real range.
Park courts cluster between £6-£10. A max_price: 10 ceiling effectively filters to council park / community courts; £15-£25 brings in premium indoor / private club venues.
For evening play in autumn/winter, ask the assistant to filter for "indoor" in its synthesis — it'll lean on venue name patterns (most indoor venues say so).
Pricing shown as "Check App" usually means the ClubSpark instance hides the price until you select a court. The slot is still bookable — click the link.
Premier Tennis venues often have better-published metadata (price, format) than ClubSpark instances. If the data quality matters to you, prefer the Premier Tennis-flagged results when both are available.

How this compares to checking ClubSpark manually

For one specific venue you book at regularly — your home court — ClubSpark direct is faster. You bookmark it once, log in, see your member rate.

For everything else, the MCP connector wins. The 30+ separate booking instances were never designed to be searched at once; LayUp's MCP is the search layer LTA doesn't ship. And because the assistant returns booking links that go directly to the right ClubSpark slot, you skip the navigation cost — find on Claude, book on ClubSpark, done.

For browsing without a specific goal — "what's on this weekend, surprise me" — the LayUp tennis page and the app's search view are still the cleanest. The MCP is best for known-shape queries you'd otherwise need 5 tabs to answer.

Privacy and how the data flows

The MCP server is anonymous — no LayUp account required, no credentials accepted, no writes back. The assistant sees only what an anonymous visitor to LayUp sees: public availability, public prices, public booking links.

Provider data sourced via the OpenActive ecosystem (Premier Tennis, and several leisure-centre operators with tennis) is licensed CC-BY-4.0. ClubSpark and LTA data comes through direct integration channels.

Full install instructions for every supported client live at app.layupsport.com/connect.

Frequently asked questions

Does this work for both Premier Tennis and ClubSpark?

Yes. LayUp's dataset includes Premier Tennis (via the OpenActive ingester) and the bulk of ClubSpark-affiliated boroughs (via direct integration). A single search_slots query returns results from both, ranked by start time.

Can Claude book the tennis court for me?

Not today. The assistant returns the slot details and a direct link to the booking page (ClubSpark, Premier Tennis, or wherever the venue lives). You sign in there and pay. Booking-through-the-assistant is a planned Phase 2 surface, gated on per-platform partnerships.

Are private club courts (e.g. Queen's, Hurlingham) in the search?

Generally no. Private member clubs that don't expose a public booking surface aren't in LayUp's dataset. The MCP returns council courts, LTA-affiliated venues, leisure-centre tennis, and the Premier Tennis network — basically anything an unaffiliated member of the public can book.

How fresh is the availability data?

LayUp pulls availability from the underlying booking platforms regularly — most providers refresh every 1–4 hours. Real-time refresh isn't possible (the providers don't offer it), but the data is current enough for "is there anything Saturday morning" queries. For last-minute searches under 30 minutes out, double-check on the provider site before driving over.

What about doubles court bookings or member-only courts?

The default search returns whatever the provider exposes publicly. If a court is members-only, it usually doesn't appear at all in the public feed. For doubles specifically, the booking is the same as singles — you book the court, fill the slot.

Why doesn't the assistant know about indoor vs outdoor?

The slot record stores time, price, spaces, and venue — not the venue's surface characteristics. You can ask the assistant to filter by venue name patterns ("Bishop's Park indoor", "Vauxhall indoor tennis") and it'll lean on those, but there's no structured indoor/outdoor field today. It's on the roadmap.

Can I save my favourite courts and get alerts?

Not from the MCP. The server is anonymous and stateless — it has no account context. For favourites and release-time alerts, sign in to the LayUp app and use the favourites + alerts surface there.