English Open Championship Venues: The Complete Guide
Four English Open Championship venues remain on the rota — Birkdale, Lytham, Sandwich and Hoylake. What each asks of a player, and how to visit.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished The Open22 min read
- First English host
- Royal St George's, 1894
- English clubs on the rota
- 4
- Oldest host club
- Royal Liverpool, founded 1869
- Governed by
- The R&A
Sandwich in Kent got the championship in 1894, and until then no Open had been played anywhere but Scotland. Thirty-four editions had gone by at Prestwick, Musselburgh and St Andrews before the game's oldest championship crossed the border. JH Taylor won that week at Royal St George's, and the decision to go south turned a Scottish event into a British one. Everything else on the English side of the rota follows from it.
Four English clubs are used now. Two more were used and then let go. The pattern that connects them is simple enough: every English Open has been played on a links, on sandy ground within sight or smell of the sea, on turf that drains and firms and gives a bouncing ball somewhere unhelpful to go. There is no English inland course on the rota and there never has been. That constraint narrows the field of candidates to a handful of clubs on three coasts — Kent, Lancashire and the Wirral — and it explains why the same names keep returning.
The four English clubs on the current rota
The R&A does not publish a fixed cycle. Venues are announced a year or more in advance, and the gap between visits to any one course has varied from four years to nearly four decades. What exists in practice is a pool of clubs that have passed the tests of course, infrastructure and space, from which the championship is allocated.
| Club | Town | County | First Open | Opens staged |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal St George's | Sandwich | Kent | 1894 | 15 |
| Royal Liverpool | Hoylake | Merseyside | 1897 | 13 |
| Royal Lytham & St Annes | Lytham St Annes | Lancashire | 1926 | 11 |
| Royal Birkdale | Southport | Merseyside | 1954 | 10 |
Two of the four sit within half an hour of each other on the Merseyside coast, which is a quirk of geology rather than of policy. The dune systems either side of the Ribble and Mersey estuaries are among the largest in Britain, and they produced a cluster of championship links inside a very small radius. Formby, Hillside and Southport & Ainsdale are all in the same stretch of sand; only Birkdale from that group has ever hosted the Open itself, though its neighbours have taken Final Qualifying and other R&A events.
The infrastructure test has become the binding one. A modern Open needs land for a tented village, corporate facilities, a media compound, a practice ground and parking for tens of thousands, and it needs road and rail that can move a large crowd in and out of a small town twice a day for a week. Courses that fail that test do not come back, whatever the quality of the golf. That is why the rota has contracted rather than grown, and why the venue rota and how it is decided is a subject in its own right.
Royal Birkdale: valleys between the dunes
Birkdale's dunes are the tallest of the four, and the routing threads between them rather than over them. Fairways run along flat valley floors with sandhills rising on both sides, so from the tee a Birkdale hole looks like a corridor. That layout has two consequences. The first is that the course is unusually fair for a links: a well-struck drive tends to stay where you put it rather than kicking off a shoulder into gorse. The second is that spectators can watch from the dunes, standing above the play with a clear view down the hole, which is why the club is popular with the operations side of a championship as well as with players.
The white clubhouse, built in the 1930s, looks like the superstructure of an ocean liner run aground in the sandhills. It is a fair marker for the character of the place. Birkdale does not trade on antiquity or eccentricity; it was substantially rebuilt in the twentieth century and it plays like a modern examination.
The championships decided there
The first Open at Southport came in 1954 and Peter Thomson won it, the opening leg of a run that made him the dominant Open golfer of the fifties. Arnold Palmer took the 1961 championship in weather bad enough that play was suspended, and a plaque still marks the spot in the rough at the sixteenth from which he gouged a six-iron onto the green. Thomson came back and won again in 1965. Lee Trevino took the 1971 title.
Then 1976, the week most often cited when people argue for Birkdale. Johnny Miller won it in a drought summer on burnt-out fairways, and a nineteen-year-old Severiano Ballesteros finished joint second, chipping between bunkers at the last in a way that told everyone watching what was coming. Tom Watson won there in 1983 for his fifth Open. Ian Baker-Finch's 1991 win was built on an outward half on the Sunday that has entered the folklore of the championship. Mark O'Meara beat Brian Watts in a play-off in 1998, the week Justin Rose, still an amateur, holed from thick rough at the seventy-second hole to finish fourth.
In 2008 Padraig Harrington won the second of his back-to-back titles in a gale, with Greg Norman, then in his fifties, leading into the final round. Jordan Spieth won the most recent Birkdale Open in 2017 after taking an unplayable lie on the thirteenth, hitting his next shot from the practice range, and playing the closing five holes in five under par. A fuller account of the club's holes and its history sits in the Royal Birkdale course guide.
Royal Lytham & St Annes: bunkers, bricks and a railway
Lytham breaks the picture most people carry of a links. You cannot see the sea from it. The course is boxed in on all sides by the red-brick suburb of St Annes, with a railway line running down one flank and a hotel and housing behind the closing holes. The ground beneath is genuine linksland — sandy, humped, fast in a dry spell — but the setting is domestic in a way that Sandwich and Birkdale are not.
It is also the only Open venue that opens with a par three. The first is a short hole played from beside the clubhouse, and it is a curious way to begin a championship: no driver, no width, nothing to release the nerves into. Players talk about it as one of the hardest opening tee shots in the rota precisely because there is nowhere to miss.
The bunkers
The club's bunker count is usually given as more than two hundred, and whatever the precise figure on any given day, the point is that they are everywhere and they are small. Lytham bunkers are pot bunkers with revetted faces, sited on the exact lines a good player wants to take. The design logic is that the course cannot defend itself with length or water, so it defends itself with the consequences of a drive that finishes eight yards off line.
The closing stretch is where that tells. The last four holes run back towards the clubhouse and they are long, heavily bunkered and generally into whatever wind is about. Leaders have come apart on them repeatedly.
The champions
Bobby Jones won the first Lytham Open in 1926, and the shot everyone remembers is the mashie from the sandy scrub at the seventeenth, marked now with a plaque. Bobby Locke won in 1952 and Peter Thomson in 1958 after a play-off with Dave Thomas. In 1963 Bob Charles beat Phil Rodgers over thirty-six holes to become the first left-hander to win a major championship. Tony Jacklin's 1969 win was the first by a British player in eighteen years and changed the standing of the domestic game overnight.
Gary Player won in 1974, a week that included a shot played left-handed off the wall of the clubhouse at the last. Ballesteros won in 1979, the car park championship, and again in 1988 with a final round of 65 that beat Nick Price. Tom Lehman took the 1996 title, David Duval the 2001 one. Ernie Els won the most recent Lytham Open in 2012 after Adam Scott bogeyed the final four holes. The hole-by-hole detail is in the Royal Lytham & St Annes course guide.
Royal St George's and the Open's first crossing of the border
Sandwich is the oldest English name on the list and the strangest golf course of the four. The ground moves in ways that look almost geological — great humped fairways, blind or half-blind tee shots, greens set at angles that reject a ball arriving on the wrong line. The fourth has one of the deepest bunkers in championship golf cut into the face of a dune. Nothing about the place is neutral, and players tend either to love it or to find it capricious.
Why the ground behaves as it does
The dune ridges at Sandwich run at an angle to several fairways rather than parallel with them, which is the technical reason so many good drives finish on a slope. On a course where the sandhills flank the hole, as at Birkdale, a ball that lands in the short grass stays in the short grass. At Sandwich the corrugations cross the playing line, so the fairway itself is a series of humps and swales, and two drives struck within a few yards of each other can finish with entirely different lies and entirely different views of the green. Players describe it as the least predictable of the four, and the criticism that follows is always the same: that a championship there can be decided by bounces rather than by shots. The counter-argument, made just as often, is that reading and accepting an awkward lie is a skill like any other, and that the champions Sandwich has produced are not a random sample.
The greens compound it. Several sit on plateaux with fall-offs on more than one side, and the surrounds are shaved rather than rough, so a marginal miss runs twenty yards away rather than stopping in thick grass. The recovery shot at Sandwich is therefore a decision — putter, wedge, or hooded eight-iron — more often than it is a swing.
The champions and the long absence
The 1894 championship there was the first outside Scotland, as noted. What followed was a run of history-making weeks. Walter Hagen won in 1922, the first American-born champion of The Open. Henry Cotton opened with rounds of 67 and 65 in 1934 and won, ending a decade of American dominance; the second of those scores gave its number to a golf ball still sold decades later. Bobby Locke beat Harry Bradshaw in a play-off in 1949, the championship in which Bradshaw played his ball from inside a broken bottle rather than seek a ruling.
Then Sandwich fell off the rota for more than thirty years, largely because the roads into the town could not cope with the crowds a post-war Open was drawing. It returned in 1981 with Bill Rogers, and Sandy Lyle won there in 1985 to become the first British champion since Jacklin. Greg Norman's closing 64 in 1993 is still discussed as one of the great final rounds. Ben Curtis won in 2003 in his first major championship as a player nobody had backed. Darren Clarke took the 2011 title and Collin Morikawa the 2021 one, the fifteenth Open at the club. The Royal St George's course guide goes through the holes.
Royal Liverpool at Hoylake, where the amateur game grew up
Royal Liverpool was founded in 1869 on what had been a racecourse, and traces of that flat original ground survive in the opening holes, where an internal out-of-bounds — the Cop, a low turf bank — runs along the edge of the practice field and puts white stakes in play on a hole most courses would call benign. It is a genuinely unusual hazard and it has cost championships.
Hoylake's claim is historical as much as architectural. The first Amateur Championship was played there in 1885. The first international match between England and Scotland followed in 1902. The club produced Harold Hilton and John Ball, amateurs who won Opens against professional fields, and it has hosted Walker Cups and Amateur Championships in numbers no other English club matches. If you want the origin story of competitive amateur golf in Britain, it begins on this stretch of the Wirral, and it connects directly to the Walker Cup and the GB&I amateur set-up.
The professional record is long. Hilton, a member, won the first Hoylake Open in 1897 as an amateur. Sandy Herd won in 1902 using the new rubber-cored Haskell ball, a result that finished the gutta-percha era inside a season. Bobby Jones took the 1930 Open there as the second leg of the Grand Slam. Roberto De Vicenzo won in 1967, and then the championship did not return for thirty-nine years, the club having fallen behind on the space and access a modern Open needs.
It came back in 2006. Tiger Woods won on fairways baked to the colour of straw, hitting driver once all week and playing long irons off the tee to keep the ball short of the run-out areas. Rory McIlroy won in 2014. Brian Harman won in 2023, on a course that by then had a rebuilt short seventeenth, Little Eye, perched above the estuary with a green that shrugs off anything struck without conviction. More on the routing in the Royal Liverpool course guide.
The English courses that dropped off the rota
Two clubs on the Kent coast, both within a few miles of Sandwich, have hosted and no longer do.
Royal Cinque Ports at Deal staged the championship in 1909, won by JH Taylor, and in 1920, won by George Duncan. It was down to host again in 1949, but the course flooded badly in winter storms and the championship was moved along the coast to Royal St George's — which is how Locke and Bradshaw came to play their play-off there. Deal has never had it back. The course is still regarded as one of the best links in England and it takes Final Qualifying and other championships, but the ground is low-lying, the sea defences are a permanent concern, and the access is worse than Sandwich's.
Prince's, immediately next door to Royal St George's, hosted once, in 1932, when Gene Sarazen won. The club's course was badly damaged during the Second World War, when the land was used for military training, and the rebuilt layout — now twenty-seven holes in three loops of nine — is not the course Sarazen played. It has never been a serious candidate since.
| Former English venue | Opens | Years | Why it stopped |
|---|---|---|---|
| Royal Cinque Ports, Deal | 2 | 1909, 1920 | Flooding, low-lying ground, poor access |
| Prince's, Sandwich | 1 | 1932 | Wartime damage, course substantially rebuilt |
- 6English clubs that have hosted
- 4Still in use
- 2Dropped
- 3Opens at the two dropped clubs
Counts English host clubs across the whole history of the championship, not the size of any current rota announcement.
The wider lesson is that a course leaving the rota is almost never a judgement on the golf. It is a judgement on drainage, roads, railway capacity and the acreage available for infrastructure.
What hosting actually asks of the club
The championship is staged by The R&A rather than by the club, and that division of labour is the thing members of the four English hosts understand and outsiders almost never do. The R&A brings the championship, the contractors, the grandstands, the broadcast compound and the operation that runs it. The club supplies a golf course, a great deal of land it normally uses for something else, and the better part of a year of disruption.
Preparation begins several seasons out, not several months. Greens have to be brought to a firmness and a speed that will survive a week of heavy foot traffic and whatever the weather does, the rough has to be grown in and then cut back to the height the championship setup specifies, and any change to the course itself — a rebuilt bunker, a lengthened tee, a hole reworked entirely — must be finished with enough growing seasons behind it to look and play as though it had always been there. The short seventeenth at Hoylake was in the ground years before the championship it was built for.
The land, and how much of it goes
Then the acreage disappears. A practice ground, a tented village, hospitality, a media centre and parking for a crowd counted in tens of thousands take up more space than the eighteen holes in most cases. At a links boxed in by a town, which is exactly Lytham's problem, the club has to borrow playing fields, neighbouring farmland and other clubs' ground to find it. Build-up runs for weeks and the breakdown for weeks more, so the calendar cost to the club is measured in months at either end of the championship rather than in the seven days people see on television.
The members pay for it in golf. Visitor play stops, member play is restricted and then stops altogether, the clubhouse is handed over to officials, and for a stretch of the summer the club they joined belongs to somebody else. Most host clubs run a ballot among members for tickets and for the volunteering roles inside the ropes, and most members regard the whole business as worth it. An Open is the thing the club exists to be capable of holding, and the course generally comes out of it in better condition than it went in, because a decade of planned work gets done against a deadline that cannot move.
What none of that buys is a guaranteed return. Hosting once obliges The R&A to nothing, as Deal and Prince's each discovered, and the next allocation is assessed against the same criteria as the last one.
How the English links differ from the Scottish ones
The distinction most often drawn is between dunes and flat land. Scottish rota courses tend to sit on relatively low, open ground — the Old Course at St Andrews is famously featureless from a distance, and Carnoustie and Muirfield are not dune courses in the Birkdale sense. The English venues, Lytham excepted, are built into much larger sandhill systems. That changes the golf. On a dune links you are often playing a hole in a defined corridor with the wind funnelled and altered by the sandhills; on an open Scottish links the wind hits you square and the whole course is visible at once.
There is a second difference in green complexes. The English courses generally have smaller, more sharply contoured greens set into their surrounds, where several Scottish venues have vast shared putting surfaces that permit approaches to be run in from a hundred yards out. Lytham and Sandwich in particular ask for a ball flighted and stopped rather than chased along the ground.
A third is the double green and the shared fairway, both of which are Scottish inheritances that never really took hold south of the border. English links are, on the whole, routed as out-and-back or as two loops with individual corridors. What both traditions share is the fundamental point about the surface: the ball bounces, the ground is part of the shot, and a strategy built on carry distance alone is not a strategy at all. That is covered properly in the guide to what links golf actually means.
Getting to each host town, and where to sleep
All four venues are reachable by rail, which matters in championship week when parking is remote and shuttle queues are long.
| Venue | Nearest station | Line | Nearest large town |
|---|---|---|---|
| Royal Birkdale | Hillside or Birkdale | Merseyrail Northern, from Liverpool Central | Southport |
| Royal Lytham & St Annes | Ansdell & Fairhaven, or St Annes-on-Sea | Blackpool South branch, via Preston | Blackpool |
| Royal St George's | Sandwich | Kent coast line, via Ashford or Ramsgate | Canterbury |
| Royal Liverpool | Hoylake | Merseyrail West Kirby branch | Liverpool |
Southport has the deepest stock of hotel rooms of the four, a legacy of its Victorian resort years, and it has the further advantage that Liverpool is half an hour down the line if the town sells out. Lytham and St Annes are small, and most people staying for a Lytham Open end up in Blackpool, Preston or Lytham's own guest houses, booked a long way ahead. Hoylake and West Kirby have limited accommodation, so the Wirral and central Liverpool absorb the demand.
Sandwich is the hardest. It is a small medieval town with narrow streets and a handful of inns, and the Open crowd disperses across Deal, Ramsgate, Broadstairs and Canterbury. If you are travelling from London for a Sandwich Open, the high-speed service into Ashford and the connection onwards is generally quicker and less stressful than driving into east Kent on a championship morning. Practical detail on tickets, bag rules and getting through the gates is set out in the Open spectator guide.
Championship week on the ground
Three of the four host towns put a station within a walk of the gate, which is the single fact that decides how a spectator's day goes. Hillside and Birkdale stations sit either side of Royal Birkdale and both are a few minutes on foot from the course. Ansdell & Fairhaven is a short walk from Lytham. Hoylake station is close enough to Royal Liverpool that the walk is part of the atmosphere of the week. Sandwich has a station too, on a single-track stretch of the Kent coast line, and it is comprehensively overwhelmed by an Open crowd.
Everything else is park-and-ride. There is no public parking at any of these courses during a championship; cars go to fields several miles away and are shuttled in, and the queue to leave in the evening is longer than the queue to arrive. Anyone driving should plan to arrive early and stay late rather than fight the two peaks.
Take waterproofs whatever the forecast said at breakfast. All four venues are within a mile or two of open water, weather arrives off the sea with very little notice, and the dunes offer no shelter worth the name.
What each course asks of your shot shape
Wind direction changes everything, so what follows is a tendency rather than a rule.
Birkdale rewards a player who can hold a ball straight in a crosswind. The valley fairways are generous enough that a controlled draw or fade both work, but the sandhills funnel and swirl the wind at green height, and a high ball that balloons gets punished. Trajectory control matters more than shape.
Lytham demands accuracy off the tee above everything. With so many bunkers on driving lines, several of the best rounds there have been built on irons and three-woods from the tee, accepting longer approaches in exchange for playing from grass. It also asks for a good long-iron game because of the closing stretch.
Sandwich asks for tolerance of the unfair. Perfect drives finish in awkward stances on humps; blind and semi-blind shots require commitment to a line you cannot see. A player who needs to watch the result of a shot to trust it tends to struggle there. The ability to shape a low ball into a crosswind is close to essential.
Hoylake asks for discipline and course management. The out-of-bounds on the opening holes, the estuary along one side and the run-out areas in a dry year all reward a player who will take less club off the tee and accept a mid-iron in. Woods's 2006 win is the textbook example: he decided the driver was a liability and left it in the bag.
None of that translates cleanly to a club golfer playing off the members' tees, where the carries are shorter and the trouble is further away. What does translate is the habit of choosing a landing area before choosing a club, which is the discipline all four courses reward and which is easier to practise at home than a low fade into a crosswind. The other transferable lesson is putting from off the green. On firm links turf the ball rolls truer through a fringe than most visitors expect, and the shot that costs least when it goes wrong is nearly always the one played along the ground.
Qualifying and the warm-up weeks around the English venues
The championship does not arrive in isolation. In the weeks beforehand, The R&A runs a qualifying structure that puts competitive golf onto courses near the host, and the clubs that neighbour the Open venue frequently take a stage of it. Southport & Ainsdale, Hillside, West Lancashire and the Kent links have all been used at one time or another.
The structure has two domestic tiers. Regional Qualifying is played over eighteen holes at a spread of clubs around Great Britain and Ireland, open to a wide entry, and it feeds a much smaller number of players into Final Qualifying. Final Qualifying is thirty-six holes in a single day at a handful of links courses, roughly a fortnight before the championship, and the leading finishers at each venue go straight into the field. Both are explained in detail in the guides to Open qualifying overall and to Regional Qualifying specifically.
- ExemptionMost of the field is exempt under published categories and never plays a qualifying round at all.
- Regional QualifyingEighteen holes at a spread of clubs across Great Britain and Ireland, open to a wide entry.
- Final QualifyingThirty-six holes in a single day at a handful of links, roughly a fortnight before the championship.
- The championshipThe leading finishers at each Final Qualifying venue go straight into the field.
The structure of the two qualifying stages. The number of places at each is revised by The R&A and is not fixed.
The R&A also revises the exempt list annually, and the balance between exempt places and qualifying places shifts with it. What does not change is that Final Qualifying is one of the best days of accessible spectating in the English golf calendar. Entry is usually free or nominal, the fields contain club professionals alongside tour players who have slipped out of exemption, and you can stand three feet from the ropes.
Playing them yourself, outside championship week
All four take visitors and all four expect you to have arranged it properly. The common conditions are advance booking, restricted days and times, an active handicap record from a recognised system, and a standard of dress and behaviour that will be enforced by the starter rather than suggested.
Green fees at the English Open venues sit at the top of the domestic market and rise steeply through the summer. They fall a long way in winter, when the courses are on temporary greens less often than people assume — links drain, which is the whole point of them — and when a still, cold, clear February morning at Sandwich or Hoylake is arguably a better experience than a crowded July one. Caddies can generally be booked in advance and are worth it on Sandwich and Lytham, where local knowledge of blind lines and bunker carries is worth several shots to a first-time visitor.
Two practical points. The first is that Birkdale and Hoylake are close enough to combine in a single trip, and the surrounding coast — Formby, Hillside, Southport & Ainsdale, Wallasey, West Lancashire — is dense with courses of championship quality that cost a fraction of the Open venues. The second is that visitor access closes entirely for extended periods in the run-up to a championship, sometimes for months, while the course is prepared and infrastructure goes up. If you want to play a venue in a year it is hosting, plan for the following spring instead. Broader guidance on booking, etiquette and what clubs expect of visitors is in the visitor access guide for English clubs, and the wider English golf section sits under our golf coverage.