40 6 2 10 1 5 9 7 13 3 8 4 12 11 14 15 16 17 18 GB&I DEVELOPMENT Written by Adam Lawrence and Richard Humphreys When people were required to stay at home to avoid spreading the Covid virus, golf became one of the only recreations available. Many people returned to a game they had played before but stopped, and others discovered it for the first time. Six years on, golf participation in the UK is near historic highs, with around 5.5 million people playing the game on full-length courses. Membership of traditional golf clubs in England stands at around 750,000, an increase of 100,000 since the pandemic. Junior golfer numbers are up 34 per cent, the number of adult females playing has doubled and the average age of golfers has fallen by five years. With numbers like that, it’s hardly surprising that British and Irish clubs and developers are keener to invest money in their facilities than they have been for many years. Traditionally, those golf courses have been run on a shoestring, with any course improvements done bit by bit over a period of time. The elite Loch Lomond club bucked this trend with an enormous sandcapping project, estimated at £7.5 million, which finished around the time of the pandemic, and when the McGuirk family, owners of Prince’s in Sandwich, bought Chart Hills GC a few years ago, they embarked on a similar, though less grandiose, exercise. But generally, it had been a bunker here and a tee there. The last few years have seen this change. Most interestingly, we have finally seen the restoration movement, so popular in the US, start to get a real foothold in the UK and Ireland after years in which clubs have talked about restoration but never really taken it on. The Addington was first to embark on a massive restoration, while St George’s Hill and Sunningdale represent exciting projects at two of Britain’s classic clubs. The traditional strategy of British and Irish clubs has been to hold revenue tightly and spend it only when absolutely necessary, because even when times are good, bad times must be round the corner. It remains to be seen whether the present spike in activity is a sign of fundamental change, or a shortterm bubble. But for the golf course architecture business in the UK and Ireland, the good times are now. FEATURE British and Irish golf participation has boomed since the Covid pandemic, but this wasn’t initially reflected in new golf course projects. In the last couple of years however, many have emerged. New golf in the old country
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