By James Zug
There are giant squash clubs—for example, Hasta La Vista in Wroclaw, Poland has 33 courts—and then there are minuscule ones.
These are unicorn clubs: not a court attached to a private home, but rather an accessible, free-standing, member-owned key club with a single court.
There are two of these unicorn clubs that I know of; perhaps readers here can tell me of others.
One is in England. Recently, I got a call from the BBC asking me to join in a radio show to talk about squash and the Olympics. When we went live, I was joined by members of the Cornhill Squash Club. I was slightly embarrassed: I had never heard of the club.
Situated in Northamptonshire, in a rural setting yet just a half dozen miles from the city of Northampton, Cornhill was originally designed as a Rugby fives court, 33 x 20 feet, thus one foot longer and one foot narrower than what years later became the standard softball squash court. Its original owner, Frank Burn, was a coal-mining magnate who had learned squash and fives when he was at Rugby School and the University of Cambridge. In 1909 Burn erected a mansion called Cornhill Manor that included 20 bedrooms and a ballroom with a Canadian maple floor, the same as the floor of his new court situated in its own building about 200 yards away.
The club is thriving. It has 80 members, the most since 1988; for the first time, the club entered a team into the Northants Winter Squash League, which came in fourth in Division III
There is a tragic side to the story. Burn, as John Carrington’s history of the club explains, was also the owner of the West Stanley pit in Durham where 168 coal miners were tragically killed in an explosion in February 1909. (One of the 30 survivors was the grandfather of soccer legend Kevin Keegan.)
In the 1960s the court building, made of brick and slate, was legally separated from the estate, and in April 1970 a cohort of squash players formally established the club. In 2009 they were asked by a neighbour residing near the front wall of the squash court to reduce noise, so the club shortened the court from 33 to 32 feet, finally converting it after a century of use to the standard length. The club has recently joined the twenty-first century: it replaced its manual booking sheet with an online system in 2016 and in 2023 installed LED lighting.
After the BBC show, I arranged to visit Cornhill and have a hit with Carrington and Terry Cattle.
The club is thriving. It has 80 members, the most since 1988; for the first time, the club entered a team into the Northants Winter Squash League, which came in fourth in Division III; in November 2025 the court was fully refurbished at a cost of £9,000.
A few months later I went to Keene, a small town in the U.S. state of New Hampshire, to visit another unicorn club, this one with a grandiose name: the Amalgamated Squash Chowder and Development Corporation.
The ASC&DC has an uncannily similar history to Cornhill. A family of Harvard graduates built the court in 1910 (two years after Harvard built its first squash courts). In 1958 a cohort of squash players bought the court and moved it to a new spot in town, and then in 1976 the court was moved a second time to its current location. Today ASC&DC has two dozen families as members; a slightly tricky heating system (crucial for New Hampshire winter nights); and like Cornhill, non-regulation dimensions (32 x 18.5 feet). Gary Gargan, an assistant coach at Tufts University in Boston, comes up weekly to give lessons.
Like Cornhill, the stand-alone building consists of simply the court, a tiny anteroom and a dusty loft. Outside is a port-a-potty. Like Cornhill, it has a festive annual meeting which includes New England clam chowder soup (hence the name) and a hoary, now lost tradition of asking new members to leave the court not by the back door but by an ingenious fire escape mechanism in the front-wall tin. I got the pleasure of that unique egress when I first visited the club in 2003.
Like Cornhill, the ASC&DC might be the oldest continuously active court in its country. Maybe being a unicorn means surviving longer than clubs with more courts?
