Queen's Club Championships — History, Guide & Past Champions

Queen's Club returns to the women's calendar on London grass

The Queen's Club in West Kensington carries one of the deepest grass-court pedigrees in the sport, but the women's tour event is a new chapter rather than an old one. For decades the venue was a men-only fixture — the cinch Championships, long a marquee Wimbledon tune-up. The WTA's arrival at Queen's restored top-level women's tennis to the grounds for the first time in roughly half a century, slotting a WTA 500 into the compressed grass swing between the clay of Roland-Garros and the fortnight at Wimbledon.

That calendar position defines the event. The grass season is the shortest surface block of the year, and Queen's gives the top women a high-stakes acclimatization week alongside parallel stops like the Berlin Open, the Libéma Open, and Eastbourne. Low bounce, quick skid, and the premium on first-strike serving and return-game compression make form here a sharper Wimbledon signal than any clay result — which is exactly why the draws skew toward genuine grass specialists and big servers.

The honor roll is short by design, given the event's age, but the standard was set immediately. Donna Vekic took the 2026 title over Emma Raducanu, blanking the Briton in the opening set 6-0 before closing out a second-set tiebreak — a scoreline that underscored how punishing the margins are on a surface where a single early break can decide a set. For Vekic, a long-established grass threat, the trophy fit a career built on flat, low-trajectory hitting tailor-made for the lawns.

As a relatively young WTA stop, Queen's is still building its identity, but it has the rarest asset in tennis: real grass-court history under its feet and a slot on the calendar that every Wimbledon contender now has to plan around.

Past champions

Every Queen's Club Championships champion on The Drop Shot — 4 editions from 2023 to 2026. Francisco Cerundolo and Donna Vekic won the most recent edition (2026).

Most Queen's Club Championships titles on record: Carlos Alcaraz (2).