Hill Club

Founded in 1876 by British tea planters, the Hill Club began as a gentlemen's club with only a billiard room and bar. Its current clubhouse, built in the 1930s by the firm Edwards, Reid and Begg, stands on a 6.9-hectare property on Grand Hotel Road in Nuwara Eliya, next to the Nuwara Eliya Golf Club. Women and Sri Lankans were barred from membership until 1967. Today it operates as a heritage hotel and restaurant with 44 rooms, a formal dining room, library, bars and tennis courts.

The Hill Club was established in 1876 by planters W. H. Walker, J. Wickwar and H. Saunders as a colonial-era gentlemen's club in Sri Lanka's hill country. The present building dates to the 1930s. Its clay courts hosted Ceylon's national lawn tennis championships from 1884 to 1971, and the Ceylon Lawn Tennis Association was based here from 1915 to 1954. Membership, once restricted to European men, opened to women and Sri Lankans only in 1967; the club now has around 950 members. Visitors and overnight guests can dine in the formal dining room, where a jacket-and-tie dress code applies at dinner, alongside a library, billiard room, two bars and four tennis courts.