Tommy, I'm sure that most of the courses you are thinking of are old - at least pre WWII. Largely they'll have been built with the minimum of earth moving on a pretty low budget, even though the early members of these clubs will have been from the professions. They probably had good natural sites on which to lay out their courses and, as at Crowborough, they used the indigenous features well.
I think if you looked at many contemporary courses in Britain, but NOT at the high end, you would see some very dull design, because they no longer have access to the best sites - they've already been used.
A local example is Heyrose, which has been developed bit by bit over twenty years and is improving all the time. At first the greens were very basic - just an extension of the fairway, but slowly they are replacing greens, one or two a year, with more constructed ones. They'll never be as interesting as those about which you are thinking because the site simply doesn't have the potential.
And, of course, when those classic courses were built there were so many wonderful architects working in Britain who had such imagination - they would surely have stood out in any age.