Golf in London

I very much admire this article on London’s Public Golf Courses I read recently on the Time Out website. If you’re a golfer living in London I urge you to read it.

The piece was written by Timothy O’Grady, who has written several books, including ‘On Golf’ published by Yellow Jersey, the same publisher who recently released Bring me the Head of Sergio Garia by Tom Cox. I think I’m going to enjoy On Golf particularly though - it sounds like the work of an obsessive.

I do promise to get back to reviewing golf courses soon, but for the minute, golf books are providing me with an easier distraction.

Anyway, in his article for Time Out, O’Grady writes:

“All through my golfing life I’ve heard the game described as something only for the wealthy and snobbish while I played most of my golf on public courses with green fees the price of a round of drinks and where people changed their shoes on a bench….

I have always thought it the most truly democratic of all games…

I’ve played with small children, jazz drummers, grandmothers, CEOs of multinational corporations, priests, professors, rubbish collectors, hoodlums, postmen, models, gymnasts, barmen, poets, black, white, Korean, Kenyan and Thai people and a man with one arm.”

I can’t agree more. We’re lucky to have so many public golf courses, and luckier still that some golfers and course architects took such an interest in their development. The idea that so many courses lay hidden behind bollards, password codes, letters of invitation, prohibitive fees, and accompaniment by members gives the game a bad name. It just isn’t golf. Are they somehow better than St. Andrews?

If there must be private clubs, and I suppose so long as there are Jaguars and Bank Managers there must, can’t the R&A at least put some pressure on them all to have at least one day a week when they are open to the public at a reasonable rate? Or the planners demand it as a condition of granting planning permission.

Can’t we have a golfer’s equivalent of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act? Surely every golfer deserves the right to roam.

Thank you, thank you very much.

(London golfer has left the soap box)

Incidentally, O’Grady also reports that the 12th at Hainault is one of Henry Cotton’s ‘One Hundred Best Holes in Britain’ - He’ll get now argument from me there.