Whites, Strawberries and a Royal Box: Wimbledon's Guarded Traditions

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Few rules at Wimbledon are enforced as strictly as its dress code, which requires competitors to wear almost entirely white clothing on court, down to undergarments, a standard tournament officials have not hesitated to enforce even against top-ranked players sent back to the locker room to change. Strawberries and cream, sold by the tens of thousands of portions across the fortnight, have been served at the Championships since at least the 1880s and remain the tournament's best known culinary tradition. The Royal Box overlooking Centre Court carries its own protocol: spectators once bowed or curtsied to any member of the British royal family present, a custom the All England Club relaxed in 2003 to apply only when the reigning monarch or the Prince of Wales attends.

The tournament's grass courts, now the last Grand Slam surface of their kind, demand a groundskeeping regimen built around a specific ryegrass blend, mown to a precise height and re-seeded every year, that no other major tournament maintains. Wimbledon has also long resisted the visible court-side sponsor branding common at other majors, keeping its own courts comparatively bare of advertising as a matter of institutional preference. Even the tournament's calendar carried a fixed tradition until recently: the middle Sunday of the fortnight was kept as a rest day for decades, a practice the All England Club only abandoned as a fixed rule in 2022, moving to a full daily order of play throughout the Championships.