The British Masters Explained: History, Hosts And Venues

A tournament that changes course every year is doing something unusual. Most professional golf events are defined by their ground: the BMW PGA Championship is Wentworth, and the association is a large part of what the event sells. The British Masters deliberately gave that up. Since it came back onto the schedule in 2015 it has run on the opposite principle — attach the tournament to a player rather than a place, let the player pick the course, and accept that the venue will move.

That decision explains most of what is odd and most of what is good about the modern British Masters. It has been played on a heathland course in Surrey, a links on the Southport coast, a resort in Northumberland and a Warwickshire complex best known for the Ryder Cup. No two consecutive editions have felt the same. For an English golf follower it also means the tournament has a decent chance of coming within driving distance at some point, which is not true of any other event of its rank.

Origins in the Dunlop Masters and the tournament's early standing

The tournament's ancestry runs back to the Dunlop Masters, an invitation event backed by the Dunlop sporting goods company and first played in 1946. Post-war British golf had very little high-value stroke play outside the Open Championship, and the professional calendar was assembled from a scatter of club-backed and newspaper-backed tournaments with modest purses. An event with a manufacturer's money behind it and a restricted, invited field was a genuine step up.

It kept that standing for a long time. Through the 1950s and 1960s the tournament sat behind the Open and the News of the World Match Play in the informal hierarchy of British professional golf, and the roll of honour from those decades reads as a list of the men who dominated the domestic game. The purse was substantial by the standards of the era, and an invitation was itself a statement about where a player stood.

Sponsorship changed hands more than once and the name changed with it. The event ran under Dunlop's badge, then under a tobacco brand, then under the plain British Masters title, and later picked up further commercial names. Anyone tracing its history through record books will find the same competition listed under several different titles in different decades, which is why the continuity is easier to see in the venues and the winners than in the name on the trophy.

By the 1990s and early 2000s it was firmly a European Tour event rather than a domestic invitation, played at a rotating set of established English courses — Woburn and The Belfry among them — with a full tour field and world ranking points attached. Lee Westwood won it during that period, a detail worth holding onto, because he later returned as host of the revived edition.

Why the invitation format mattered

The distinction between an invitation event and an open-entry tour event is not a technicality. An invitation field is chosen, which means the organisers can guarantee a standard of player, and a guaranteed standard is what a sponsor and a broadcaster are paying for. It also means the tournament can be selective about who it excludes, which in the mid-twentieth century gave events of this kind a social weight that had nothing to do with the golf.

The modern tour dismantled most of that. Exemption categories, order-of-merit qualification and a published ranking replaced the committee's discretion, and the number of purely invitational places shrank to a handful. What survives of the older approach at the British Masters is exactly those remaining places, which the host and the tournament use to shape the field at the margins. It is a small residue of a much older way of assembling a tournament, and it is the part that still produces the occasional unexpected name on a Thursday tee sheet.

Why the tournament fell off the schedule

The British Masters stopped being played in the late 2000s, and the reason was not a loss of interest from players or spectators. It was money.

A tournament of this type is funded by a title sponsor, and the sponsor is buying a fixed set of things: television exposure, corporate hospitality space, brand presence around the leaderboard, and a week of association with a well-regarded field. When a sponsorship contract runs out, the tour has to find a replacement at a comparable level or the event has no budget for prize money, course preparation, grandstands, television production and everything else in the operating cost. Tobacco sponsorship restrictions removed one category of backer from British sport altogether. The financial conditions of the late 2000s removed several more.

Once the title sponsorship lapsed, the event dropped out of the schedule rather than continuing at a reduced level. That is the usual outcome. A tour is reluctant to run a flagship-adjacent tournament on a purse that undercuts its own standing, because the field weakens, the television numbers fall and the event becomes harder to sell the following year. Better to pause it.

The pause lasted several seasons. During that stretch the domestic schedule in England was unusually thin, with the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth carrying almost the entire weight of the season on home soil. The gap is the single most important fact about the tournament's history, because it is what the revival was designed to fix, and it is why the modern edition was structured so differently from the old one.

The revival and the host-professional model

The tournament returned in 2015 at Woburn with Ian Poulter attached as host, and the host-professional idea arrived with it.

The mechanics are straightforward. A leading British player is named as tournament host. Their name goes on the event's promotion, they take an active role in choosing the venue and shaping the week, they play in the tournament, and they use their standing to pull other players into the field. In practice the host is the tournament's chief recruiter — a personal call from a Ryder Cup player carries more weight with a peer than an invitation letter from a tour office ever will.

The commercial logic is equally clear. A sponsor is buying association with an individual as well as an event, which is a far more legible proposition than association with a tournament that has been off the schedule for years. The host's own charitable foundation usually becomes the week's designated cause, which gives the event a public purpose beyond the leaderboard.

There is a cost to it. The tournament gives up the accumulation of memory that comes from returning to the same course. Nobody has a favourite British Masters hole in the way they have a favourite Wentworth hole, because the holes change. The event also carries a structural fragility: if no suitable host is available in a given year, or the host's own form or availability shifts, the model wobbles in a way a fixed-venue tournament does not.

What the host actually does

The role is more than a photograph on the entry page. A host is typically involved in course setup discussions with the tour's agronomy and championship staff, in deciding which tees are used and how the closing holes are configured for spectators, and in the design of whatever spectator feature the week is built around — a stadium hole, a walk-on practice area, a junior zone. Hosts have pushed for genuinely unusual ideas: shorter drivable par fours, reconfigured finishing stretches, spectator arrangements that would be unthinkable at a major championship.

They also carry the awkward part. The host is expected to talk to the press on the days when the weather has ruined the course, and on the days when they have missed the cut at their own tournament. Several have had to do exactly that.

Why the venue changes every year

Because the host changes, and the venue follows the host.

The connection is usually personal. A player nominates a course they grew up on, learned on, hold a membership at, or have some other real link to. That produces venue choices no tour scheduling committee would arrive at independently — a Northumberland resort, a Southport links that had not staged a men's tour event in decades — and it is the most interesting consequence of the whole model.

It also spreads the tournament geographically. English professional golf has a persistent centre-of-gravity problem: the Surrey and Berkshire heath belt holds more championship-standard courses within an hour of each other than the rest of the country combined, and events cluster there for straightforward logistical reasons. A rotating British Masters is one of the few counterweights. It has taken a full tour field to the north-east and the north-west, which matters to spectators in those regions who otherwise face a long journey to watch anything of comparable standard. Our guide to DP World Tour events in England sets out how thin that domestic schedule actually is.

The trade-off is operational. A tournament that moves every year rebuilds its infrastructure plan from scratch each time: traffic management, park-and-ride, television cabling, grandstand positions, hospitality footprint, spectator crossings. None of it is reusable in the way it is at a fixed venue, and the tour's operations staff effectively run a new event annually.

English courses that have staged the modern British Masters

The revived tournament's venue list is the clearest illustration of what the model produces.

Year	Venue	County	Host professional	Winner
2015	Woburn	Buckinghamshire	Ian Poulter	Matthew Fitzpatrick
2016	The Grove	Hertfordshire	Luke Donald	Alex Norén
2017	Close House	Northumberland	Lee Westwood	Paul Dunne
2018	Walton Heath	Surrey	Justin Rose	Eddie Pepperell
2019	Hillside	Merseyside	Tommy Fleetwood	Marcus Kinhult
2020	Forest of Arden	Warwickshire	Lee Westwood	Renato Paratore
2021	The Belfry	Warwickshire	Danny Willett	Richard Bland
2022	The Belfry	Warwickshire	Danny Willett	Thorbjørn Olesen

Later editions have continued in the same pattern, and hosts and venues for those years are best checked against the tour's own listings rather than taken from memory — the arrangement is confirmed only a season or so at a time, and it has changed more than once at short notice.

Look at what that table contains. Woburn is a wooded three-course club on the Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire border, long associated with women's professional golf. The Grove is a parkland resort north of Watford. Close House sits above the Tyne valley west of Newcastle and had almost no championship history before Westwood took the tournament there. Walton Heath is one of the great heathland courses anywhere and has staged a Ryder Cup — our Walton Heath club guide covers it properly. Hillside sits immediately alongside Royal Birkdale on the Southport dunes and is a championship links in its own right. The Belfry is a Ryder Cup venue with a purpose-built spectator amphitheatre around its closing holes.

Six distinct types of course, in eight years, on one tournament. That is not an accident; it is the design working.

The 2020 edition and what it showed

The 2020 tournament was staged at Forest of Arden as part of a compressed run of English events played without spectators. It is worth noting for a specific reason: it showed that the tournament could be relocated and rescheduled quickly when circumstances demanded, precisely because it was not welded to a single course. A fixed-venue event has one date and one place and very little flexibility. A rotating one has practice at moving.

The names on the trophy and what the roll of honour shows

The modern winners' list is not a list of established stars, and that is the interesting part.

Matthew Fitzpatrick's win at Woburn in 2015 was his first on the European Tour, at 21. Paul Dunne's win at Close House in 2017 came with a closing round that held off Rory McIlroy. Eddie Pepperell won at Walton Heath in 2018, on a course that punishes anything loose off the tee. Richard Bland's win at The Belfry in 2021 remains the best story the revived tournament has produced: a first tour victory at 48, after a career measured in hundreds of starts without one.

Interleaved with those are established winners — Alex Norén at The Grove, Thorbjørn Olesen at The Belfry — and a Scandinavian presence that reflects the tournament's status as a genuine continental draw rather than a domestic exhibition.

The pre-revival roll of honour is a different kind of document. It runs across decades of British and Irish professional golf, under several sponsor names, and includes players who defined their eras. Lee Westwood's presence on both sides of the gap — winner in the earlier run, host in the modern one — is the neatest link between the two versions of the tournament.

What the modern list does not contain is a repeat winner. The eight editions in the table above produced eight different champions on seven different courses. A tournament that changes venue annually gives nobody a course advantage to build on, which is a plausible reason the winners' list looks the way it does.

Format, field size and the 72-hole stroke play test

The British Masters is a standard DP World Tour stroke play event, and the format holds no surprises.

Element	How it works
Competition	72 holes, stroke play, four rounds over four days
Field	A full tour field, typically in the region of 144 players
Cut	After 36 holes, to a set number of players and ties
Weekend	Two rounds from the cut field, played in reverse order of score
Ties	Sudden-death playoff over designated holes
Ranking points	Awarded on the Official World Golf Ranking's field-strength calculation

The field is assembled through the tour's standard exemption categories — previous winners, ranking positions, order-of-merit standing — with a small number of invitations at the tournament's disposal. Those invitations are one of the host's practical levers, and they are frequently spent on English amateurs and young professionals who would not otherwise get into a field of this standard. For a player emerging from the English amateur championships, a British Masters invitation is often the first serious professional test.

Prize money is set by the tour and published in advance with the schedule. It sits below the tour's flagship and Rolex Series events and above the standard weekly purse, though the exact figures move with sponsorship and are best read from the tour's own schedule rather than assumed.

Where it sits in the DP World Tour season

The tournament has been scheduled at different points in the calendar — early season, late summer, autumn — and the placement makes a material difference to the field and to the golf.

An autumn date in England means short days, low light, soft ground and a real chance of a weather delay. It also puts the event inside the closing stretch of the tour season, when players are chasing card retention and Race to Dubai positions, which sharpens the competition at the bottom of the field even when the top of the leaderboard is quiet. A summer date gives firmer ground and better weather odds but competes with a crowded international schedule for the leading players.

Relative to the rest of the English calendar, the British Masters sits clearly second to the BMW PGA Championship, and the gap is discussed at the end of this page. Above both, in a different category entirely, is the Open Championship, which is a major and operates on a scale nothing on the domestic tour schedule approaches.

Scheduling also determines who turns up. A date immediately before or after a major, or in the same fortnight as a big American event, costs a tournament several of the players it would most like to have, because the top of the world ranking plans a season around peaks and travels accordingly. A date in a quiet week is worth more to field strength than a larger purse in a busy one. The tour balances that across a global calendar in which the British Masters is one of a great many competing claims, and the result is that the tournament's position has moved repeatedly rather than settling.

For a spectator, the practical consequence is that the week the tournament falls in is not predictable from year to year, and an autumn edition is a very different day out from a midsummer one. Late-season golf in England is played in light that fails by mid-afternoon on the final day, on ground soft enough to hold a full shot, with rough that has stopped growing but has not stopped being thick. It rewards a different set of skills — control of trajectory, patience, a willingness to take par and move on — than a firm summer course does.

What a host club does in the eighteen months beforehand

Staging a tour event is a substantial undertaking for a golf club, and the preparation starts long before the tournament week.

The course work comes first. Greens have to be brought to tournament speed and held there for a week, which for most clubs means a change in mowing and rolling regime months in advance. Rough is grown to a specified height, bunkers are rebuilt or re-sanded to consistent depth, and tees are extended where the tour wants additional length. Some of that work is permanent improvement the club keeps. Some of it is a temporary condition the club spends the following season recovering from.

Then the infrastructure. A tournament requires a tented village, hospitality units, grandstands, media facilities, a practice range configured to tour standard, television towers and cable runs, generator positions, spectator walkways, crossing points and a great deal of temporary fencing. Much of that sits on ground that is normally fairway or rough, it arrives weeks early and it leaves weeks late. A club typically loses a large part of its own playing season to build-up and breakdown.

The trade is visibility. A tour event puts a course on television for four days, in front of an audience that includes every golf tourist deciding where to spend a week. Clubs that rely on visitor income treat that as a marketing investment with a measurable return — a calculation set out in more detail in our guide to green fees at English courses. Regions benefit too: hotel occupancy, restaurant trade and transport use all rise for the week, and the local tourism bodies that part-fund some editions are buying exactly that.

Attending: tickets, travel, parking and what is on site

Practical detail first, with the caveat that every edition is different because every venue is different.

Tickets are sold online through the tournament's official channels and the DP World Tour, and they normally go on sale several months ahead with an early-bird price that expires. There is no ballot; it is straightforward advance purchase. Practice days are cheaper than competition days, and the Wednesday pro-am is often the cheapest ticket of the week with the best access to players. Juniors are commonly admitted free when accompanied by a paying adult, though the age limit varies by edition and should be checked before travelling.

Parking is almost always a separate pre-booked ticket rather than something included with entry. Several venues have no realistic on-site parking at all and run a park-and-ride from a nearby site. Rail access varies enormously — The Grove and Woburn are within reach of London commuter lines, Hillside sits close to the Merseyrail network at Southport, and Close House needs a car or a shuttle from Newcastle.

On site, expect a tented village with food, a merchandise shop, and grandstands at the closing holes and at least one feature hole. Spectator movement at a tour event is far less restricted than at a major: you can walk with a group for a full round if you want to, and on a Thursday morning you can stand very close to the golf. Bring waterproofs regardless of the forecast. English autumn tournament weather has ended more spectator days than it has flattered.

If you are choosing between this and the other big English week, the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth is the larger and more crowded occasion. The British Masters is generally the easier one at which to actually watch golf.

Charity, grassroots golf and the host's foundation

Each edition attaches itself to a charitable cause, usually the host professional's own foundation or a chosen partner, and this is a structural feature of the model rather than a decoration bolted on afterwards.

The mechanisms are the ordinary ones: a proportion of ticket revenue, charity days built around the pro-am, auctions of playing spots and memorabilia, and collection points on site. What makes the arrangement work is the host's personal investment — a player promoting a cause with their own name attached to it will do more media for it than a sponsor's corporate responsibility team can generate in a month.

The grassroots effect is harder to measure and probably real. A tour event in a region that does not normally get one produces a spike in junior interest at the clubs within reach of it, and county organisations schedule taster sessions and coaching days around the week deliberately. Whether that converts into sustained participation depends on what the local clubs do next rather than on the tournament, and the honest position is that nobody has published convincing long-run evidence either way. The bodies that would capture it — county golf associations and England Golf's affiliate network — track membership numbers rather than causes.

The tournament's role in giving English players a home start

For an English professional, a home tournament is worth more than the prize fund suggests.

It is a week without a flight, without a hotel bill in a foreign currency, and often within a short drive of home. It is a week in front of a crowd that recognises them. And for players outside the top of the world ranking it is one of very few chances in a season to play a full-strength tour event in front of a home gallery, which is a different psychological proposition from playing the same event in Spain in February.

The invitation places matter most. Every field carries a handful of spots at the tournament's discretion, and they routinely go to English players who are between categories, returning from injury, or newly professional. A good week on one of those invitations can change a season, because tour prize money and ranking points are the entry currency for everything above.

There is also the pathway question. English golf produces a steady supply of accomplished amateurs through the county system and the national championships, and the gap between winning the English Amateur and holding a tour card is where most of them are lost. A home tour event with discretionary invitations is one of the few bridges across that gap. It is nowhere near wide enough on its own.

British Masters or BMW PGA Championship: which carries more weight

Both are English, both are on the DP World Tour, and they are not close in standing.

The BMW PGA Championship is the tour's flagship. It is played at Wentworth every year, it carries a purse and field strength well above the weekly norm, it attracts players who spend most of their season on the PGA Tour, and it is the one week where the European tour's own membership is most fully assembled. The Wentworth West Course has hosted it for decades and the association is total.

The British Masters sits below that on every measurable axis — purse, field strength, ranking points, television reach — and its own history is the reason. A tournament absent from the schedule for several seasons does not simply recover the standing it had before the gap, whatever its lineage. It is still rebuilding.

What it has instead is the thing Wentworth cannot offer: unpredictability. A new course most of the field has never seen, a different region every year, a host with an actual stake in the week, and a winners' list full of first-time champions. That is a genuinely different kind of tournament, and for a spectator it is frequently the more interesting one even though it is not the more prestigious.

Anyone building an English golf-watching year around live events will get more out of attending both than out of arguing about the order. Start at our England golf hub for what else is on, or read the wider golf section for coverage beyond the domestic tour.