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Golf Tour in St Andrews

A few weeks back, seven friends and I made a golfing pilgrimage to the home of golf. For some in the group, this was their first experience of St Andrews and the main aim was securing two tee times in the Old Course ballot.

For most, this annual golfing competition is one the highlights of the year. Four rounds of golf, three nights of party…..a pretty decent recipe for a good time!

Onto the golf, the first round took place over the Balcomie Links at Crail. Once a squally shower passed through just minutes before our tee times, we were treated to a gloriously sunny afternoon. In general, the golf was pretty decent, and the course was in good condition. In terms of the holes themselves, there are some really good holes, most notably the par 4 5th, which wraps its way around a bay. Unfortunately, there are a few too many average holes, however, the setting is fantastic, which more than makes up.

The day before the trip we found out that only one of the four balls had been successful in the Old Course ballot for the second days’ golf, with three of the successful four having played the course before. Unfortunately however, the ‘three’ were permitted from swapping places with the Old Course ‘virgins’. Nonetheless, the unfortunate four ball decided to queue up early the next morning and chance their arms (resulting in a relatively ‘quiet’ first night). Little did they know that they would be attempting on what turned out to be the course’s busiest day of the year! Arriving at 5:45am, they were 43-46 in the queue (no 1 arrived at 11:30pm the night before…so much was the demand!) At 7:30am, they threw in the towels and headed for a round on the New Course.

With four of us on the Old and four on the New, we decided that day two could not count towards the ‘Cup’. Being one of the fortunate four on the Old, I was grateful for another opportunity to play and further examine / study / experience the Old Course. It definitely does helps when you play well, but as per my last and only other game, I once again walked off thinking, ‘This place is great’!!!

After two days of calm, we awoke to a stiff morning breeze on Day 3. The breakfast banter was all about embracing the conditions and looking forward to the challenge….some were even ‘glad’ they would now get the ‘proper’ links experience. Needless to say, after just a few holes on the Jubilee, not many of us were as ‘embracing’, with one of the ‘links’ course novices exclaiming….’I just don’t get how people can love links golf?!’ (he wasn’t saying that after 38 points on day 1 though) Stableford scores plummeted and the high points from day 1 were now a distant memory. So, with golfing egos out the window and tails between respective legs, we headed off the ‘Jigger’ to drink away our golfing blues.

As morning broke on the final day, the day / night before had clearly taken some casualties… (I being the worst hit – for which I was duly awarded the MVP prize!) But this was ‘pay day’….a year’s worth of bragging rights – a year of being called ‘Champ’!!

Our final examination was set for the New Course, with the same stiff breeze from day 3, further adding to the challenge. Scoring was once again difficult (i.e. poor) and coming down the final few holes we had a feeling that the scores were going to be close….and so it turned out! Over three rounds of stableford competition, first to last were covered by a mere 6 points….with the winner being a fine gentleman called Greg Betz.

(On a personal note, the head unfortunately only seemed to ‘clear’ on the 9th tee, with the first 8 holes being relegated to a mere blur! Not even a late back nine rally and a birdie on the 18th could propel me to the top of the leaderboard…..but everyone had similar tales of woe!)

A truly memorable few days up in St Andrews was had by all – Great golf in a great place with good friends = Good times!

in Dave Sampson

A "work experience" at European Golf Design

Spending time at a golf design company has been a great experience, learning how the course for which the game I love to play is created has opened my eyes to a new dimension of golf. The process of design is far more complicated than the average golfer could ever imagine, but the guys at EGD explained it all; enabling me to have a good go at it whilst not feeling that I was shooting blind. After spending several days shifting around hole shapes on a site map, trying to get my head around what would work and what wouldn’t.

After coming up with an eighteen-hole plan I assumed that the drawing of fairways and greens would be straightforward. In fact it was challenging to get them to work with the space available and to fit with the contours of the site. Learning how to grade the land and attempt to flatten some areas while considering drainage was a painstaking process which involved much trial and error; but the result was very satisfactory when right.

Spending time in a place with such a warm and welcoming atmosphere has been a great experience. I learned a lot about golf course design, as well as not to put a sausage roll anywhere near a dog again. It was a pleasure working there, and getting to know everyone at EGD.

Dan Steele.

in General

European Golf Design – Update

Construction work continues on projects stretching from the Caribbean to the Middle East. Our organically maintained course in St Kitts nears completion. One of the many interesting features of this will be the ‘edible’ rough – the areas that one would normally expect to be far-rough (ie that unmaintained stuff into which balls disappear but rarely emerge) will instead be farmed, with the crops produced used in the restaurants within the resort. Work has just started at the JCB project in the UK, as is the case in St Petersburg in Russia. Having just completed and opened one course in Marrakech, our involvement in Morocco continues with the Plages des Nations project near Rabat. Further afield, work is now well underway in the UAE at Dubai Hills and is just about to start again at King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia.

While all that goes on, we’ve design work at various stages of completion in Turkey, UK, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, India and France. With the Ryder Cup just around the corner, Matt is busy finalising site plans for Gleneagles (these are the plans you’ll see in all the public areas and programmes showing the facilities, spectator routes and so on around the course). It’ll be interesting to see whether this Ryder Cup is the first major sporting event to be hosted in the newly independent Scotland!

Jeremy.

in Jeremy Slessor

Out on the Course

“Do you get to play the courses you’ve designed?” It’s a question I’m often asked by people when they hear what I do for a living, and the answer is “yes, but not as often as you might think”. Although we might visit a new golf course thirty or more times during construction and establishment the opportunities to play the course are actually few and far between. We might get a small window of opportunity to play the course, or more usually a few holes, before opening day, and then perhaps once or twice more when we make our final site visits, but thereafter the chance to take on our own design are fairly infrequent. Even when you do visit the course over subsequent months and years, we’re normally too busy looking at it professionally to have time to play it leisurely.

So when we get the chance to return purely for golf we tend to grab it with both hands, and recently we’ve revisited a couple of EGD courses which were originally opened in the late ‘90’s. Ten days ago three of our number took time out to play the course we designed with Ian Woosnam at Dale Hill Hotel & Country Club in East Sussex. The course, which has some wonderful panoramic views of the surrounding “1066” countryside (a reference to nearby Hastings), was in great shape and a delight to play on a wonderful summer’s day.

And then last week I was lucky enough to be invited to the Woburn Classic Golf Day which was played on the Marquess Course, the youngest of three wonderful courses at Woburn Golf & Country Club. It had been some time since I last visited the course and I was eager to see how it looked and played. Well, all I can say is that I was impressed. The conditioning was superb, certainly the best I’ve seen there over the last 15 years, and John Clarke, the Golf Course Manager at Woburn, and Gary Leadbetter, his head greenkeeper on The Marquess, deserve a huge amount of praise.

This has been an exciting time for Woburn, and especially for The Marquess Course which had its 14th birthday in June this year and had two great reasons to celebrate. Earlier this month it was one of four courses around the country to stage the Final Open Championship Qualifying (the other three qualifying courses selected by the R&A were Sunningdale New, Hillside and Gailes Links). Irish amateur Paul Dunne comfortably led the Woburn qualifiers with Oliver Fisher and Celtic Manor touring pro Rhys Enoch (a man who obviously likes EGD courses!) taking the other two places available.

The week after Open Qualifying it was announced that The Marquess will be the venue for the 2016 RICOH Women’s British Open Championship. This is a major coup for Woburn and shows how The Marquess is held in increasingly high regard, particularly when one looks at the current rota for the championship. The venues for the proceeding years leading up to 2016 will have been; The Old Course, St Andrews (2013), Royal Birkdale (2014) and Turnberry Ailsa Course (2015).

The Marquess already has a track record of hosting high quality tournaments, having staged two British Masters soon after it opened in 2001 and 2002 and then the English Amateur Championship in 2011, and it is great news that it will now stage one of women’s golf major championships. In fact 2016 will be an exciting year for EGD as well. With the RICOH Women’s British Open on The Marquess and the Evian Championship at Evian Resort Golf Club, two of that year’s women’s major championships will be played on EGD courses.

Above: 7th Hole on The Marquess

Above: 14th Hole on The Marquess

in Ross McMurray

One of the best 9 hole Courses in the Land?

In December 2011, Golf Monthly ran an article on ‘100 Hidden Gems’. One of these mentioned ‘gems’ was Reigate Heath Golf Club, a 9 hole course situated on the common land just outside the picturesque Surrey town.

On a balmy summers evening last week, Gary, Rob and I headed round the M25 for an evening’s game. Setback from the main road, for those unfamiliar to the area, the course is actually rather well ‘hidden’. But as you make your way along the country road, turning right up the entrance track, you are immediately struck by the view of a most amazing clubhouse and accompanying windmill! (National Golf Links of America aside, we couldn’t think of too many other courses with such a feature). Perched on top of the hill, with fantastic views down over the course and surrounding countryside, this clubhouse was a stopping point for golfers, walkers and runners a like.

After taking in the views for a short while, we made our way down to the first tee. Although only a 9 hole course, each hole has two sets of tees, offering some good variety in terms of playing angles, elevation change and length. Playing over heather and through woodland, the course itself is not overly long, but we were warned by the club pro that we shouldn’t be fooled…. ‘You’ve played well to shoot your handicap’, he said. How right he was….this is a proper test of golf!

The greens themselves offered numerous pin locations, but with some steep and long slopes in places, they were definitely a challenge. As were the well placed riveted bunkers! The front 9 plays to a par of the 34, with three par 3s, five par 4s and the solitary par 5 on the course, coming at the 4th. This hole is played as 450yard par 4 on the back side. There is good mix of hole lengths and the collection of par 3s, which range in length from 120yards to 230yards off the back, was excellent……just like the course conditioning!

A couple weeks back we managed to enjoy the fun and quirkiness of Painswick Golf Club in the Cotswolds. Reigate Heath is just as enjoyable….and as Rob mentioned, ‘If only we lived a little closer, we could be filling in those membership forms!

It may be a 9 hole course, but personally, I haven’t played a better one!

in Dave Sampson

18 Holes on 25 hectares; you must be joking I thought!

For years Robin has been telling us about Painswick Golf Club in the Cotswolds. Last week we finally managed to get there to see it for ourselves; it didn’t let anyone down.

After a monster breakfast we were thrown in at the deep end, a 220 yard par 4 which on the scorecard looks like a very friendly start; wrong, it plays 25m up the hill to a blind green with a 15ft quarry in front of it. It must be one of the shortest holes that is virtually un-driveable. So the first hole breaks some our ‘rules of golf architecture’, and so does almost every hole after that, there are blind par 3’s, shared fairways, crossing holes, and last but not least, holes playing over roads and even cross roads.

Having said all that it was as much fun as I’ve ever had on a golf course, for every shot there was a choice of 3 or 4 clubs, and for every club there was 3 or 4 shot options, you definitely have to think your way round this course and I look forward to returning knowing it a little better, I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing to be honest, blissful ignorance helped me a few times the first time round!

Above: Pano from 6th tees

Above: Approaching the 15th Green

in General

What's happening at European Golf Design

We’re currently working, on a geographical basis, from the Caribbean to India. The construction work at Kittitian Hill in St Kitts is nearing completion – Gary was on site last week and with the help of near-legendary shaper/project manager Bob Harrington and the unlimited passion and involvement of developer, Val Kempadoo, it’s shaping up to be a quite beautiful course. For more information on Val’s philosophy and approach to the project, take a look at the project web site, which is inspirational: www.kittitianhill.com. Gary is finishing up the project in Marrakech which opens next month and is also involved in the new project in Dubai for Emaar at their Dubai Hills development. It’s fair to say this has been a fast-track project – design didn’t start until September while machines rolled on to site early in January to start the bulk earthworks.

As well as his work at the JCB project in the UK and Plages des Nations in Morocco, Rob is currently working on master planning with Vatika Group and U+A Studios on a beach site near Puducherry in southeastern India which will feature golf, a limited number of villas (most of which will have sea views) and a boutique hotel. It’s not often one is presented with 80Ha of beachfront property to work with – even less often when the property is absolutely untouched by previous development of any kind. He’s also involved with a project in North Cyprus for an Istanbul based development group.

Dave is spending most of this time on the 36 holes planned for Bodrum in Turkey. Dogus Grubu, one of the largest companies in Turkey, has bought an existing course, with additional land already zoned for development. Our brief is to deliver a resort-friendly course and a longer, more challenging tournament venue, effectively starting from scratch. IMG will be developing a sports academy on site, in addition to the ubiquitous residential and hotel elements which are being designed by WATG. When he’s not concentrating on that, Dave’s working on our long-standing project at King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia which, after a hiatus of several years, has recommenced with construction due to start again in the very near future.

From the middle east, we move to Russia and, more specifically, the city of White Nights – St Petersburg – where Ross (between meetings for his project in Manchester) is putting the finishing touches to the detailed design package for a course on the southeastern edge of the city. If you’ve never been, it is a beautiful city but suffers from horrendous traffic problems (as does Moscow) which means getting from A to B can take an inordinate amount of time, but once you’re there… The site is relatively flat, but possesses a magic ingredient in that the soils are a wonderfully pure sand. As the client wants to develop a family friendly project with many different leisure facilities, we (along with WATG who are working on this one too) are creating a lake with a total area of around 50Ha (not far short of the size of an average golf course) which will be used for boating, swimming and so on in the summer, and skating in the winter. All of the excavated material is being used to raise the remainder of the site out of the flood plain. Everyone’s a winner.

Beyond that, Matt is hugely busy with tournament planning for the European Tour’s staging team, in addition to the web site work he does for various players, and his production responsibilities for us. Alex is keeping the production work on schedule, as well as being a house-dad this month to his two young boys – he did suggest after the first couple of days that he couldn’t see what all the fuss about child care was all about…he’s been less vocal as the month has continued! Shara takes care of everything else – she’s been through our annual financial audit, helping me prepare for Board meetings with our shareholders, preparing month-end accounts and generally keeping the office ticking over with her normal (extraordinary) level of efficiency. And I’ve been out and about talking with new and existing clients. Without wishing to tempt fate, it seems that things have picked up across many regions and confidence has returned sufficiently that legitimate people are moving ahead with legitimate projects – if there has been anything good to come out of the past five years, it is that it’s acted as the biggest ‘idiot filter’ in living memory: the time-wasters have disappeared from the marketplace and long may that continue!

in Jeremy Slessor

Return of the Bolton Wonder

We have received many admiring comments about the clay model made of the new course we’re designing for JCB…and rightly so. It is a wonderful piece of craftsmanship. The man responsible for the model is Jeff Shuttleworth, from Bolton and he deserves all of the plaudits.

The idea for the model came from JCB Chairman Lord Bamford. He’s not a fan of computer generated imagery and prefers the tactile, three dimensional qualities of a good model. He felt that the golf course proposal could be more amply appreciated and understood if people were able to get up close to and walk around a large scale site model. He was proved to be right.

EGD was asked to suggest a model maker and I immediately recalled this chap who had made a fantastic single-hole model for us back in the days when I used to work for Hawtree. This was nearly twenty years ago though and both his name and company details had long since escaped me. I turned to the one person who I thought may just remember him, my former design colleague, Mike Cox. Remarkably, Mike not only remembered him, but had done some work with him in recent years. The only problem was, as Mike told me, that Jeff had retired from professional model making several years ago. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I gave Jeff a call and left a message on his answer phone, explaining what we had in mind.

Later that day, Jeff called back, sounding somewhat surprised and said that he’d be very keen to look at the job, but that he’d thrown away his model making tools, thinking he’d never be needing them again! Things move quickly and efficiently when you deal with JCB and shortly thereafter, Jeff was engaged to produce the model in time for a public exhibition and press launch in January 2014. This gave Jeff two months to complete a task that needed three! It also forced us to accelerate our design schedule, as Jeff’s model is scaled to our detailed 1:1000 plans, which weren’t due to be completed until Christmas 2013.

Necessity is the mother of invention and to cut a long story short, we pumped out the design plans in double quick time and Jeff exceeded all expectations of him and delivered the completed model in good time, working 18-20 hours a day, all through December and the Christmas holidays.

There was a palpable sense of excitement when the model was unveiled and it was, for me, immensely rewarding to see the design of our course so accurately portrayed. Jeff is very particular about how the model should be lit to accentuate the shadows and contours. Keep the lighting at a low angle and from one position only. In these conditions, the model springs to life, highlighting every bump and hollow. Jeff’s attention to detail is incredible and you can spend hours gazing over the model. It is quite mesmerising.

It’s been a thrill to see the model take shape under Jeff’s skilled hand. He’s lost none of the magic and if there is any justice, he should find himself with a few more to do in the future. JCB are thrilled with his work and so are we. Photographs of the model have formed the centrepiece of the worldwide press coverage, explaining what the course will look like better than any computer rendering or sketch can do.

The model sits for now in the JCB executive offices, but in time it is envisaged that it will reside in the foyer of the new clubhouse at Woodseat Hall. Hopefully, you might get to see it there, but for now, here are a few photos of Jeff’s fantastic work.

in Robin Hiseman