Is the New Wentworth it!
While not suggesting that we’ve been sneaking in around the back like a bunch of stalkers to look at the work going on at Wentworth’s West Course this summer and autumn, as we’re just a few minutes up the road, we have to confess to having spent a little time in the evenings nipping over to see what’s been happening there.
Without getting into the rights and wrongs of what’s been done, you have to admire the ambition of the design. It would have been very easy to have treated the West Course with all due respect to the original designer Harry Colt, to its reputation and traditions. It would have been easy to simply upgrade the greens without fundamentally changing anything. But, someone has taken an incredibly bold decision to, effectively, abandon the old course and come up with something very new and very different, albeit on the same footprint as the old course. Visually it is stunning. Whether it is appropriate for the heathland setting, whether those that play it will enjoy it and whether it will be a commercial success will only become clear once it opens. But ‘tentative’ it is not.
Jeremy,
There is nothing wrong at all re-designing a course to be totally different to that of the original but it is a shame to claim that it is some form of redesign with the original Architect’s intent being still intact when in fact it is not.
The owners of Wentworth did not have to even mention Colt, it their course and they can do with it whatever they want to but do claim to upgrade a course in Colt’s name when it is nothing at all like what a Colt course looks like.
Hello Jeremy,
A good topic to raise and one that is of interest to anyone who has ever played there, lives just up the road or indeed in my case, worked there.
The Wentworth club is a commercial operation with an owner who wanted to update the course to make improve its intrinsic value and maintain its status and reputation. As long as the design changes meet that criteria, and do not make the course seem ‘tricked up’, I don’t see that Colt’s design comes into the equation any more. As for the Heathland nature that you mention, most of that went many years ago. The courses plays like a parkland course, and most of the game is of the aerial variety, so I imagine that it will appear more in the ‘amercian style’ once it is revealed on the TV in May. The development that has been undertaken is interesting and raises many other questions.
http://www.kmgcgolfconsultant.com/2009/11/listed-protection-for-golf-courses.html#more