One of the influences, probably for the worse, on new golf courses, their emergence and their design was the 1987 report by the R and A, The Demand for Golf. In the words of Dominic Pedlar, Golf World May 1996, this, 'was widely interpreted as a licence to print money. But as the golf-dreamers conjured up ever grander scheme against a background of spiralling land prices, the bubble had to burst. Many powerful lessons have been learned.'
Cheshire, where I live, is an affluent county. At the top end we have the Premiership footballers and their wives, some pretty nasty criminals, captains of industries, money launderers, a recent influx of immensely wealthy Saudis and a number of Russian oligarchs. In the 1980s four high-budget courses were built: Carden Park, Portal, Shrigley Hall and Mottram Hall.
Mottram was part of a De Vere development with a Dave Thomas course. From the back tees it is long and demanding, and the back nine is very good if you are a good enough player to essay it. It survives because of De Vere's money. It attracted overseas football teams coming to play at Old Trafford or Eastlands. It has all the trimmings necessary - training pitches for the footballers, helipads etc.
Carden Park was a hotel complex developed on a historic site by a former owner of Alton Towers the famous country park full of roller coasters etc. You would have thought he would have understood about money. No, he caught a bad cold and the place was sold. I think De Vere might have bought it. They brought in Jack Nicklaus to design a second, 'Championship' course. It occasionally hosts professional tournaments at a level somewhat below European Tour, but the name of Nicklaus continues to bring in big parties of visitors attending the hotel for conferences etc. It is successful. The Nicklaus course is unutterably dull.
Portal was developed by a farmer trying to put his land to better and more profitable use. His course was designed by Donald Steel and I have to say I used to have a lot of time for it. It was expansive. You could not easily hit onto a wrong fairway, such was the space between them. It was imaginatively routed, with some really good green complexes and lovely bunkering. Hardly a tree was on the course and there was very much a feeling that this could have been a Colt, Braid or Fowler course built 75 years late. As the economy turned down the farmer committed suicide. The corporate golf market at which this project had been aimed had collapsed. A buyer was found, and also for the neighbouring Oaklands, and now I believe there is to be a hotel. But the original Portal course has been ruined by the insertion of a further nine holes. It is now overcrowded from the aesthetic point of view, although I doubt that many who play here now are able to compare it with what it first was.
Shrigley Hall had been a monastery. Where postulant monks once prayed now nubile sylphs lounge in the swimming pool. It is a hotel and it has a Donald Steel golf course. Like Portal and Carden it has seen difficult financial times and has changed hands more than once. The course is, in my view, a curate's egg. There are magnificent views from the hills over the Cheshire plain. But it rains a lot up here and the drainage leaves a lot to be desired on parts of the course. I've never spoken to Donald about it, but I suspect he didn't have the budget he really needed to create a better course. Obviously a lot of earth moving took place on such a hilly site, and yet there are oddball holes which simply get you from one difficult piece of terrain to another equally difficult piece. There are some excellent holes, some utterly unmemorable holes and some which go beyond the boundaries of enjoyable quirk.
Contrast these with our new pay-and-play or proprietary courses. These were built on the back of the R and A's paper. Most seem to have been designed by the owner, obviously with little idea of what good design is. In two cases the farmer who owned the land did not play golf yet laid out the course himself to cut costs. Both are amongst the worst courses I have ever seen.
What of the improvements/alterations?
I'll give you two examples of Hawtree work. Macclesfield was a 12-hole course on a very mountainous and compact site. A smallish field became available on the lower side of the lane running beside the original course. Hawtree got the commission to make this an 18-hole course. Most importantly they retained all the best holes of the old course. They then developed the new field and found a way of slotting two or three new holes in at the top of the existing layout. I can't remember what the yardage was for the old 18 holes (some played twice) but when the full 18 holes had been built the yardage came down, not rose up, to 5,600 yards (although the yardage is largely irrelevant on this site). The other example is Eastham Lodge. In the mid 70s the old Port Sunlight Golf Club found that its course was to be redeveloped into new motorways and office blocks. Land in this part of the Wirral is not easy to find amidst the oil refineries, Manchester Ship Canal and so on. But sufficient was found for Hawtree to lay out a 9-hole course. When I played there in 1990 it had been possible to expand to 15 holes and with a loop of three holes played twice an 18-hole round was possible. This is not the Wirral of Hoylake or Wallasey. This is a site bounded by a main road, housing, allotments and an access road to an educational establishment, while electricity pylons and their fizzing cables cross the course. No, this is not a great course, but as you play it you are bound to reflect on just how much (and how cleverly it was done) good golf Hawtrees got out of this unpromising and unprepossessing parcel of land. (I have a feeling further land was later acquired to finish the job).
It is easy to forget the difficulties under which our under-appreciated designers manage to create silk purses from sows' ears.