Most visitors look up first. Slender arcs of steel span the hall overhead, light as a drawing held in the air. The people who work here think about the floor instead, and have done for years.

Alex plays for the club side that trains in this hall and also works on the operations team. A working day is shaped by the building: courts set out for school groups, the floor reset for club nights, the gym opened before the first session. None of it is remarkable, which is rather the point.

Under that ceiling the floor is what matters. The give in the timber on a hard landing, the spring returned on a jump, the evenness of the bounce across the full run of the hall, the absence of dead spots that make a ball sit down without warning, the change in feel from one court to the next. All of it is noticed, and all of it is discussed at length, usually within a minute of walking on.

Set at the head of a shallow bay, the hall is a large, plain volume in a place of playing fields, low sheds and long views out to the water. The outward form is quiet and almost agricultural, and gives very little away about the room held inside it, or the span of the roof it carries.

What separates this hall from its neighbours is daylight. Sports buildings are usually sealed and lit from above by hard artificial light, hour after hour, season after season. Here the light is borrowed from outside and let in deliberately, so the time of day is always legible from the middle of the floor. The effect costs nothing to run.

Light is also used to draw the edges of the room. The oval plan is eased away from the structure just far enough to slip a thin strip of glass between each panel. As the sun swings around, the walls shift from an even wash to sharp bands of shadow. The pale concrete is the anchoring move, setting a tactile backdrop against the glossed and structurally dominant space. Nothing in the room is decorative, and nothing about the way it is built is hidden.