History Of Golf In England: From Blackheath To Today

A silver club held by Royal Blackheath carries medals engraved by the men who won it, and the oldest of them dates from the 1760s. That object, rather than any founding charter, is the earliest hard evidence of organised golf anywhere in England. The club itself claims 1608, and the claim is not absurd — Scots who had come south with James VI and I were certainly knocking a ball about on Blackheath common by then — but no document proves it. English golf begins, appropriately enough, in an argument about a date.

What follows is a long, uneven story: two centuries of almost nothing, then a Victorian expansion so fast that the sport went from a curiosity to a national pastime inside twenty years, then a burst of design work that produced courses still ranked among the world's best, then war, decline, television, and the peculiar modern position of a sport with more places to play than members to fill them.

Blackheath, the Stuart court and the earliest documented play

Golf arrived in England as Scottish luggage. When the Scottish court moved to London in 1603 it brought household servants, courtiers and their habits, and Blackheath — high, open common ground on the road out of London towards Kent — was where those habits took root. References to golf being played there appear through the seventeenth century, though they are scattered and often second-hand.

The reason the record is so thin is that golf on a common needed no infrastructure. There were no greens in any modern sense, no clubhouse, no fixed number of holes, and therefore no reason to write anything down. Blackheath played a course of five holes, walked round multiple times to make a round, and used forecaddies to shout warnings to the public who shared the ground. Play of that kind leaves no archaeology.

Occasional golf is recorded elsewhere in England during the same centuries — at Molesey Hurst, and later at Manchester — but it never spread. English gentlemen already had cricket, racing and shooting; golf was a Scottish eccentricity practised by expatriates. It stayed that way, more or less, until the middle of the nineteenth century.

The oldest club argument, and why it will not be settled

Three English clubs have a serious claim to something, and they are claims to different things, which is why the dispute never resolves.

Royal Blackheath asserts the earliest origin. Its 1608 date rests on the presence of the court and on continuous tradition rather than on a minute book; the surviving records begin much later. Historians generally accept that golf was played there long before it was played elsewhere in England, while declining to certify the specific year.

Old Manchester Golf Club, formed on Kersal Moor in 1818, has documentation from its own beginning, and on the test of "oldest English club with an unbroken paper record" it is a strong candidate. It lost its ground to enclosure and racing and has moved more than once since, which weakens a different kind of claim — the club exists, the original course does not.

Royal North Devon, laid out on the burrows at Westward Ho in 1864 with Old Tom Morris involved in the routing, is the oldest English course still played over its original ground. It is a genuine links, grazed by sheep and horses under commoners' rights that predate the club, and a round there is closer to Victorian golf than anything else in England. If you want to understand what makes that kind of ground different from an inland course, the guide to links golf in England sets out the geology and the playing consequences.

Claim	Club	Date	What is actually being claimed
Earliest play	Royal Blackheath	1608 by tradition	Golf on the common, traditional not documented
Earliest documentation	Royal Blackheath	1760s	Surviving silver club and engraved medals
Continuous club records	Old Manchester	1818	Formation on Kersal Moor, with records from the start
Oldest course on original land	Royal North Devon	1864	Same links, same ground, still in play

Railways, resorts and the Victorian boom

Between the 1860s and the end of the century England went from a handful of clubs to hundreds. The mechanism was not mysterious.

The railway network is the first cause. A course reachable by train from Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham or London could draw members from a whole city rather than from one parish, and the seaside lines built to carry holidaymakers ran straight past the dune systems that make the best links. Formby, Birkdale, Lytham, Hoylake and the Kent coast all sit on or near Victorian railway lines, and in several cases the club and the resort were promoted by the same interests.

The second cause is who had time. The professional and commercial middle class of Victorian England had a half-day on Saturday, a rising income and no established afternoon sport of its own. Golf suited it exactly: playable at any age, requiring no team, and carrying a social apparatus of clubhouses, committees and members' subscriptions that this class understood.

The third is the cost of land and the cost of the ball. Dunes, heath and common were agriculturally worthless, which made long leases cheap. The gutta-percha ball, moulded rather than hand-stuffed, had cut the price of playing dramatically from the middle of the century. Golf stopped being expensive at the moment a large group of people acquired the leisure to take it up.

The pattern of a 1890s foundation

The typical English club of that decade followed a template. A group of local men — solicitors, mill owners, doctors — formed a committee, took a lease on unpromising ground, engaged a Scottish professional to lay out eighteen holes in a week for a modest fee, built a wooden clubhouse and advertised for members. Many of those courses were later rebuilt entirely by proper architects. A good number of English clubs that now describe themselves as Colt or Fowler designs began as a fortnight's work by a visiting Scot in the 1890s.

Where the boom actually landed

The expansion was not evenly spread. The Lancashire and Merseyside coast filled up first and most densely, because the dunes were there, the railway was there and Liverpool and Manchester had the money. Kent's east coast followed, serving London by the same logic. Yorkshire built inland, on moor edge and heath around Leeds, Harrogate and Sheffield. The Midlands built parkland, because that is what the land offered. The far south-west and the north-east stayed comparatively thin, and both remain so.

That distribution is why an English golfer's sense of what a normal course looks like depends heavily on where they grew up. A member at a Lancashire links and a member at a Warwickshire parkland club have inherited two different Victorian answers to the same question of where to put a course, and the differences in turf, in wind, and in how the ball behaves on the ground follow from decisions taken in the 1890s about which fields were cheap.

Women's golf grew alongside it rather than afterwards. The Ladies' Golf Union was founded in 1893, and the first Ladies' British Open Amateur Championship was played that same year at Royal Lytham and St Annes, won by Lady Margaret Scott. Separate ladies' courses, usually shorter and often on the poorer ground, were a standard feature of the late-Victorian club, and the long argument over access to the main course and the main clubhouse begins there.

The Amateur Championship and the Open's arrival at Sandwich

Two events mark the point at which English golf stopped being provincial.

The first is the Amateur Championship. Royal Liverpool at Hoylake organised an open amateur tournament in 1885, inviting clubs to send entries; it was run by the club rather than by any governing body, and was recognised as the first Amateur Championship only in retrospect. The event moved into a rota shared with Scottish courses and became the most important prize in amateur golf on either side of the Atlantic, which it remained for decades.

The second is the Open Championship coming south. From its foundation in 1860 the Open had been played exclusively in Scotland. In 1894 it went to Royal St George's at Sandwich, the first time it left Scottish soil, and it was won by an Englishman, JH Taylor. Both facts mattered. The championship became British rather than Scottish, and the English professional game acquired proof that it could compete. The venues that followed Sandwich onto the rota — Hoylake, Lytham, Birkdale and the rest — are covered in the guide to the English courses that stage The Open.

The Haskell ball and the discovery of the heathland

The single largest technical change in the sport's history arrived at the turn of the century. The Haskell ball — a rubber thread wound around a core — flew further than gutta-percha and, more importantly for the average player, was far more forgiving of a mishit. Sandy Herd won the 1902 Open at Hoylake with one, and within a season or two the gutty was finished.

Its effect on English golf was geographical. Longer flight and a softer feel made inland golf tolerable, and improvements in mowing machinery and turf management made inland greens playable. For the first time you could build a course of real quality away from the coast. The sand and gravel country south and west of London — the heath belt running through Surrey, Berkshire and into Hampshire — turned out to be very nearly ideal: free-draining, acidic, unsuited to farming, covered in heather and pine, and an hour from Waterloo.

Willie Park Junior's Sunningdale Old, opened in 1901, is usually treated as the moment this was proved. It was built on land nobody wanted, planted with trees that were not there when it opened, and it demonstrated that an inland course could hold its own against a links. Woking, laid out in 1893 and then substantially reworked by two of its own members, John Low and Stuart Paton, had already begun the argument about strategic bunkering that the heathland courses went on to settle. The Old and New at Sunningdale and the wider heathland belt are worth reading together, because the courses are best understood as a group rather than individually.

Colt, Fowler and the golden age of English design

What followed was a thirty-year run in which English course architecture became a profession. Harry Colt is the central figure: a solicitor by training, the first secretary of Sunningdale, and the first man in England to make a full career out of designing golf courses. Swinley Forest, St George's Hill and Wentworth's West course are his, along with an enormous body of remodelling work on existing courses and a long list of overseas commissions.

Herbert Fowler built Walton Heath, which opened in 1904 on high, exposed Surrey heath, and it remains one of the least compromising courses in the south of England — a subject in its own right in the Walton Heath guide. Tom Simpson brought a European sensibility and a taste for ragged, natural-looking hazards. Alister MacKenzie, a Leeds doctor who came to design through camouflage work and a magazine competition, built Alwoodley and Moortown in Yorkshire before going on to Australia and America.

What they actually did differently

The distinguishing idea of the period is strategy in place of penalty. A Victorian course typically ran holes in straight lines and put a cross-bunker or a hedge in front of the green, punishing the weak shot and asking nothing of the strong one. The golden age designers instead offered a choice: a safe line that leaves a difficult approach, and a dangerous line that leaves an easy one. Bunkers moved to the sides of fairways where a good player would be tempted, greens were angled so that the correct approach came from one particular spot, and contour was used rather than flattened.

They also planted. The heather-and-pine appearance of the Surrey courses is substantially a created effect, and the birch and rhododendron that colonised several of them afterwards have taken a century of clearance work to control. A heathland course that looks untouched is usually the most heavily managed ground in English golf.

The Great Triumvirate and England's first professional stars

Harry Vardon, JH Taylor and James Braid won sixteen Opens between them from 1894 to 1914, and their dominance is the reason the professional game in England has the shape it does. Braid was Scottish and Vardon came from Jersey, but both spent their careers attached to English clubs — Braid at Walton Heath for more than four decades — and Taylor was English by birth, from Northam in Devon, where he had caddied on the Westward Ho links as a boy.

Taylor matters beyond his five Open victories. He was the driving force behind the formation of the Professional Golfers' Association in 1901, an organisation created because club professionals were treated as tradesmen, paid badly, barred from clubhouses and dependent on the goodwill of committees. The PGA gave them a tournament schedule, a benevolent fund and a collective voice, and the modern English club professional's job — teaching, retail, running competitions, and being a member of a recognised profession — descends directly from that.

The professional's place in the club

It is worth being clear about what the job looked like before the PGA changed it. A club professional in the 1890s made and repaired clubs by hand in a shed near the first tee, sold balls, gave lessons at a fixed rate set by the committee, caddied when asked, and in many clubs was not permitted through the front door of the building he worked behind. His income came largely from the workshop rather than from any salary, which is why the arrival of factory-made clubs and machine-wound balls was an existential threat rather than a convenience.

Tournament golf was thin. There was the Open, a handful of challenge matches arranged between clubs or backed by newspapers, and very little else, so a professional's reputation was made in money matches played in front of crowds who had walked out from the nearest town. Braid, Taylor and Vardon played dozens of them. The gate money from those matches, and the exhibition tours that followed, is what allowed the best professionals to earn more than their retainers, and it is the direct ancestor of the tournament circuit that eventually became the European and DP World Tours.

Vardon's contribution was technical and popular. His overlapping grip, which he did not invent but did make universal, and his tour of the United States around the turn of the century did more to spread the sport internationally than any governing body's efforts. He won the US Open in 1900 while he was there.

Between the wars: artisans, access and who was allowed to play

The private members' club that dominated English golf by 1914 was, by design, socially exclusive. Entrance fees and subscriptions were set at a level that filtered by income, and election was by committee, which filtered by everything else.

The artisan movement was the partial answer. Artisan clubs were separate bodies of working men attached to an established club, allowed to play at restricted times — early mornings, winter afternoons — usually in exchange for labour on the course, and with no access to the main clubhouse. The Northam Working Men's club at Westward Ho, formed in 1888, is generally cited as the earliest. A national Artisan Golfers' Association was formed in the early 1920s to represent these sections, and a good number of England's best players of the first half of the twentieth century came through them.

Municipal golf was the other route. Local authorities and, in London, the bodies responsible for the royal parks laid out pay-and-play courses between the wars where anyone could turn up, pay a green fee and play without membership, election or introduction. It is an under-told part of the sport's English history and the reason golf was never quite as narrow as its reputation. The story of how public access works now, and what it costs, sits in the guides to municipal golf in England and visitor access at private clubs.

Club numbers grew steadily through the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the commuter belt around London and the Midlands. The pattern of the interwar course is suburban: parkland or heath, close to a station, built for people who worked in a city and lived at the end of a new railway or arterial road.

Ploughed fairways: wartime and the slow recovery

The Second World War took large parts of English golf out of use. Coastal links were the worst affected, because the dune systems that make good golf also make good landing beaches: courses on the east and south coasts were mined, wired, dug with anti-glider obstacles or requisitioned for training. Inland, the Dig for Victory campaign turned fairways into arable land and clubs grazed sheep on what was left. Others lost ground to airfields, camps and searchlight batteries.

Richmond Golf Club's wartime local rules of 1940 — providing for players to take cover during shelling, for competitors to move a ball displaced by enemy action without penalty, and for a stroke to be replayed if disturbed by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb — are the best-known document of the period, and they survive because clubs across the country reproduced them.

Clubs also lost their people. Professionals and greenkeepers were called up, and in a lot of cases the course was kept in some sort of order through the war by whoever was left — older members, women's sections, and in a few places by prisoners of war or by servicemen billeted nearby who were given playing rights in exchange for work. Several clubs suspended subscriptions entirely and survived on nothing.

Recovery was slow and material. Land that had been ploughed had to be re-seeded and then left to settle for years before it played properly. Petrol rationing kept members away from courses they could not walk to. Timber, glass and steel were controlled well after 1945, so bombed and neglected clubhouses stayed as they were. Membership numbers dipped and then rose again through the 1950s, but many clubs did not fully restore their courses until the following decade.

Television, Jacklin and the move into the mainstream

Golf became a mass spectator sport in England through the television set. Regular tournament coverage from the late 1950s onwards gave the sport something it had never had: an audience that had never been to a golf club. Peter Alliss's commentary, understated and conversational, taught a generation of viewers how to watch.

Arnold Palmer's decision to cross the Atlantic to play the Open — second at St Andrews in 1960, winner at Royal Birkdale in 1961 and at Troon in 1962 — restored the championship's international standing and gave the coverage a figure to build around. What the American professionals brought with them was a manner as much as a swing: attacking, expressive and made for a camera.

Then came Tony Jacklin. His Open win at Royal Lytham in 1969 was the first by a British player since 1951, and he followed it with the US Open the next year. The effect in England was immediate and measurable in club waiting lists. Nick Faldo's three Opens and three Masters in the late 1980s and early 1990s did the same thing for the following generation, and the Ryder Cup's move to The Belfry from the mid-1980s onwards gave English golf a recurring national occasion of its own.

Assembling the modern governing structure

English golf's administration was built in pieces and only recently tidied. The R&A had governed the rules from St Andrews since the nineteenth century by common consent rather than by any formal grant of authority. Domestically, the English Golf Union was founded in 1924 to represent the county unions and run the men's national amateur championships; the English Ladies' Golf Association followed in the 1950s to do the same for the women's game.

Three consolidations produced what exists now. In 2004 the R&A's championship and governance work was separated from the Royal and Ancient Golf Club itself, so that the body writing the rules was no longer literally a private members' club. In 2012 the English Golf Union and the English Ladies' Golf Association merged to form England Golf, a single national body for the amateur game. And in the middle of the following decade the Ladies' Golf Union merged into the R&A, bringing the women's championships — including the one described in the guide to the Women's Open — under the same roof as the men's.

Handicapping was the last piece. England had used CONGU's unified system for decades; in 2020 it moved to the World Handicap System, a single global method run jointly by the R&A and the USGA that produces a portable handicap index rather than a club-issued number. That change did more to alter the everyday experience of English club golf than any of the governance mergers, because it is the part that touches every competitive round a member plays.

The English club scene as it stands

England has more golf courses per head than almost anywhere outside Scotland and Ireland, spread very unevenly: dense concentrations along the north-west and Kent coasts and around the London commuter belt, sparse coverage in parts of the north-east and the far south-west.

The membership picture is a genuine long-run story rather than a snapshot. Club membership fell steadily through the 2000s and 2010s as the traditional full-membership model — a large annual subscription, a waiting list, a dress code and a committee — lost ground to people who wanted to play occasionally and pay per round. Clubs responded with flexible categories, nomad memberships and green-fee income, and a number closed or sold land for housing. The years from 2020 reversed the trend sharply, with a surge in participation and waiting lists returning at clubs that had spent a decade recruiting.

What the boom-and-bust cycle built

Two waves of construction left England with a stock of courses that does not match current demand very neatly. The first is the Victorian and Edwardian wave, which produced the good ground: links, heath and the better parkland, on land chosen when there was plenty to choose from. The second came in the late 1980s and 1990s, when a combination of agricultural set-aside, planning changes and optimistic forecasts of participation put a great many new courses on former farmland. Those later courses are often long, wet in winter, and built on clay that drains badly, and they are the ones that have closed in the largest numbers.

The consequence is a two-tier picture that has little to do with prestige. A modest members' club on old heath or dune land can offer better winter golf than a far more expensive course laid over a converted field, simply because of what is under the turf. It is also why green fees in England correlate so imperfectly with quality, a point taken up in the guide to green fees and what they buy.

Whether the recent rise holds is the open question, and it would be dishonest to pretend anyone knows. England Golf publishes club and membership returns annually, and those figures are the only reliable measure; any fixed number for courses or members quoted without a date is worth ignoring.

What has not changed is the ground itself. The links at Westward Ho is still grazed by commoners' sheep, Sunningdale still plays over the heath Willie Park found in 1900, and Blackheath's silver club still carries its medals. The golf section covers the modern game in more detail, and the England hub collects the rest of these guides; between them they describe a sport whose physical fabric is, unusually, very largely the one the Victorians left behind.