Royal Lytham & St Annes Guide: Course, History, Visiting
A royal lytham and st annes guide to the bunkering, the par-three opener, eleven Open Championships and how a visitor books a round on the Fylde coast.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished English Courses22 min read
- Founded
- 1886
- Royal status granted
- 1926
- Open Championships hosted
- 11
- Opening hole
- Par three
There is a plaque on the 17th fairway, set into the sandy waste on the right-hand side, marking the spot from which Bobby Jones played a shot in 1926 that most of the gallery assumed was impossible. He was in trouble, level with Al Watrous, and he took a mashie iron and struck the ball out of the sand and over the dunes to inside a few feet of the flag. Watrous three-putted, Jones won the championship, and a piece of Lancashire scrub became a monument. It is the sort of place Royal Lytham is: modest to look at, hemmed in by red brick and a railway line, and responsible for more famous shots than courses with ten times the drama in their scenery.
The Fylde setting, the railway and a course inside a town
Lytham sits on the Fylde coast, the flat Lancashire peninsula that runs from the Ribble estuary north to Blackpool. The club is in the town of Lytham St Annes, and the striking thing about arriving is how ordinary the approach feels. You drive through streets of Victorian and Edwardian villas, turn in beside a red-brick clubhouse that would not look out of place as a school, and only then discover a championship links behind it.
The course does not touch the sea. It sits perhaps a mile inland, cut off from the shore by the town and by a line of dunes, so the sea is neither visible nor audible from most of the holes. Purists occasionally use that to argue it is not a proper links. The turf, the sand beneath it, the drainage and the way the ball runs all say otherwise; this is old seaside land that the town grew around rather than parkland pretending.
The Blackpool South branch line runs down one boundary, close enough to the opening holes that trains pass at eye level while you are playing. Out of bounds down the right of the early holes is genuinely in play, and there is no more distinctive sound in English championship golf than a two-carriage train rattling past while somebody stands over a putt.
Access is easy. St Annes-on-the-Sea station is a short walk from the clubhouse, Blackpool is a few minutes up the line, and Preston connects the whole area to the West Coast Main Line. Anyone driving comes off the M55.
The enclosure is worth dwelling on, because it explains most of what the course is. A links with room to breathe can be defended with dunes, blind shots and sheer length. Lytham has almost no dunes of consequence within its boundaries, cannot be stretched, and has houses on three sides. The only available defences were sand and rough, and the club used both without restraint. A visitor arriving expecting the wild coastal theatre of Birkdale or Sandwich will find something quite different: a tight, flat, relentlessly bunkered golf course that examines accuracy and patience and offers almost nothing to a player relying on power.
Opening with a par three, and why it still surprises people
Every other course on the Open rota begins with a hole you can hit a driver on. Lytham begins with a par three of moderate length, played from a tee immediately outside the clubhouse to a green ringed by bunkers, and it is the single quirk people remember before they remember anything else about the golf course.
The reason is prosaic. When the club moved to its present ground at the end of the nineteenth century, the strip of land between the clubhouse and the railway simply would not accommodate a two-shot hole, and a short one was the honest solution. What began as a constraint has become a defining feature.
There is a second, smaller consequence that only shows up on a busy day. A par three first hole clears the tee faster than a par four does, so groups get away quickly and then queue at the second, which is why the club spaces its tee intervals the way it does. Do not be surprised by a short wait early in the round.
Its effect on championship golf is real. There is no gentle stretch in which to find a rhythm. A player walks from the practice putting green to a tee surrounded by spectators and has to hit a controlled iron shot, in wind, to a small target, with sand on every side. Bogeys at the 1st in an Open are more common than the yardage suggests, and the hole has an outsized effect on the shape of an opening round. For a visitor the effect is different but just as awkward: the first swing of the day at Royal Lytham has to be a good one, and there is nowhere to hide if it is not.
The other consequence is that the outward half has an unusual balance. Beginning with a short hole and following it with two par fours means the card front-loads scoring opportunities in a way most links do not, and it is a standing observation among professionals that if you are going to make your score at Lytham, you make it in the first six or seven holes.
The bunkering: number, placement and the strategy it forces
Lytham is the most heavily bunkered course on the Open rota. The count sits a little above two hundred, and the exact figure shifts whenever the club rebuilds, adds or retires one, which is why quoted totals differ between sources and between decades. Density is the point rather than the precise number.
They are not distributed decoratively. The bunkers cluster in the landing areas, which means the tee shot at Lytham is a question of where the sand is rather than how far you can hit it. Several holes have bunkers at two different distances down the same side, so laying back from one brings another into range, and the choice is genuinely uncomfortable rather than merely presented as such. Around the greens, the bunkers are frequently revetted with stacked turf faces, steep enough that a sideways or backwards recovery is often the only shot available.
What that does to a round
Three things follow. The first is that driver is not the automatic club. Professionals routinely play irons and fairway woods from Lytham tees, positioning the ball between hazards rather than trying to carry them, and an amateur who copies that will score better than one who tries to overpower the course.
The second is that bunker technique matters more here than almost anywhere. A revetted face two metres in front of you removes every option except a high, short splash out, and a player who cannot reliably play that shot will lose several strokes per round rather than one or two.
The third is psychological. On a course with sand everywhere, the eye is drawn to the hazard rather than the target, and the standard error is aiming away from bunkers into rough that is worse. The rough at Lytham, thick and wiry in a wet summer, has cost more championships than the sand has.
Where the sand actually sits
It helps to think of Lytham's bunkering in three groups. There are the driving bunkers, set at the distances a good player would naturally reach, staggered down both sides so that no single line is safe for every length of hitter. There are the cross bunkers, arranged across the line of play at the approach to several greens, which turn a lay-up into a calculation rather than a formality. And there are the greenside clusters, often four or five to a green, revetted, deep, and positioned on the side from which the natural miss comes.
That last group is the cruellest, because the bunkers tend to sit exactly where a shot bleeding away from the flag finishes. A player aiming at the middle of a Lytham green and missing by a small margin ends up in sand far more often than a player missing by a small margin elsewhere. This is design, not misfortune, and it is the reason professionals describe the course as demanding without describing it as long.
- Driving bunkersStaggered down both sides at the distances a good player naturally reaches.
- Cross bunkersSet across the line of play short of several greens, turning a lay-up into a calculation.
- Greenside clustersFour or five to a green, revetted, and placed on the side the natural miss goes.
How the sand is grouped across the course. Not a count of any category, which changes as bunkers are rebuilt.
Revetting, and why the count keeps changing
A revetted face is masonry made of turf. Sods are cut, stacked in courses like brickwork and set back a fraction at each layer, so the finished wall leans in over the sand and a ball that runs into it stays there. Built well it lasts a few years. Then the top courses dry out, the face slumps, and the whole thing comes down to be rebuilt by hand.
At a course with more than two hundred bunkers that is not an occasional project but a standing winter programme, worked through a section at a time, using turf that links clubs frequently grow themselves in a nursery because bought-in sod does not knit the same way.
It also explains the discrepancy between published counts. A rebuild is an opportunity to reconsider: a bunker that no longer catches anybody is retired, two that have crept together are merged, one that has drifted out of position is pulled back where it belongs. The total moves by a handful in either direction across a decade, which is why the figure in a book from the 1980s does not match the one you will be given at the club, and why nobody there is especially exercised about the exact number.
Architectural evolution and the hands that shaped it
The club was founded in 1886 and moved to its present site in the 1890s, where George Lowe laid out the original course. What exists now is the accumulated work of several generations. Herbert Fowler, Harry Colt and Tom Simpson are all associated with revisions in the first half of the twentieth century, and there has been continuing work since, largely concerned with bunker restoration and with adding length where the boundaries allow.
The boundaries are the crucial constraint. Unlike Birkdale or Sandwich, where there is duneland to expand into, Lytham is enclosed by housing and a railway. There is no more room. Every extra metre has had to be found within the existing footprint, usually by pushing a tee back into a corner, and that is why the course remains a comparatively short championship test in an era of long ones.
Royal status came in 1926, the same year as the Bobby Jones Open. The clubhouse, the Dormy House and the surrounding red brick give the club an atmosphere quite unlike the airy Art Deco of Southport, and it is worth an hour before or after a round. The way English clubs of this vintage were founded and governed is covered in our guide to English golf history, and the distinction between this kind of ground and the inland sand belt is set out in our piece on links golf in England.
The Open Championships Lytham has staged
Eleven, and a list that includes some of the most consequential single rounds in the championship's history.
| Year | Champion |
|---|---|
| 1926 | Bobby Jones |
| 1952 | Bobby Locke |
| 1958 | Peter Thomson |
| 1963 | Bob Charles |
| 1969 | Tony Jacklin |
| 1974 | Gary Player |
| 1979 | Severiano Ballesteros |
| 1988 | Severiano Ballesteros |
| 1996 | Tom Lehman |
| 2001 | David Duval |
| 2012 | Ernie Els |
Jones's win in 1926 gave the club its plaque and gave the championship one of its foundational stories. Bob Charles in 1963 became the first left-handed golfer to win a major championship, beating Phil Rodgers in a playoff. Tony Jacklin's victory in 1969 was the first by a British player in eighteen years and changed the standing of British golf almost overnight; the drive he hit down the 18th under that pressure is still cited as a model of a swing made in a crisis.
Then there is Ballesteros. His 1979 win is remembered mostly for a tee shot at the 16th that finished in a temporary car park, from which he took relief, pitched close and made birdie — the reason he was called the car park champion for the rest of his career, usually by people implying he had been lucky rather than that he had been extraordinary. His 1988 win at the same course, with a final round of 65 that he considered the best he ever played, was the answer to that. Two victories at Lytham nine years apart, one built on improvisation and one on control.
Tom Lehman in 1996, David Duval in 2001 and Ernie Els in 2012 completed the sequence. Els's win came after Adam Scott, leading with four to play, dropped shots at each of the closing holes — which is the best possible illustration of what the last stretch at Lytham does to a player in front.
What the champions list tells you about the course
Read the eleven names together and a pattern emerges. There is no winner here who overpowered the place. Locke and Thomson were positional players of exceptional control. Charles was one of the finest putters the game has had. Player was a grinder and a superb bunker player, which at Lytham is close to a qualification. Jacklin drove the ball straight under pressure. Lehman, Duval and Els were all accurate iron players having the best ball-striking weeks of their seasons. Even Ballesteros, whose reputation is for recovery, won here twice by understanding better than anyone which side of a hole to miss on.
That is a useful thing for a visitor to absorb before the first tee. Lytham does not reward the longest drive in the group. It rewards whoever spends the fewest shots in sand, and the way to spend fewer shots in sand is to accept less distance off the tee than your ego suggests.
For the machinery behind who gets into the field in the first place, see our guides to Open Championship qualifying and the exemption categories.
Beyond the Open: Ryder Cups, the women's championship and the amateurs
Two Ryder Cups have been played here, in 1961 and 1977, and the United States won both. The second matters historically well beyond its result. That 1977 match was the last contested by Great Britain and Ireland before the team was widened to bring in continental Europe, so Lytham holds the closing chapter of the old, lopsided version of the event. What the change did to the contest is covered in our English view of the Ryder Cup.
The women's championship has come here repeatedly. Annika Sorenstam won the Women's British Open at Lytham in 2003 and Catriona Matthew won it on the same course in 2009, and the golf course did to the best players in the women's game exactly what it does to everybody else: rewarded the straight driver, and took strokes off anyone who found sand at the wrong moment. The championship's own history and its route to major status are set out in our Women's Open guide.
The amateur game has a long association with the club as well. The Amateur Championship has been staged at Lytham more than once, and the course turns up regularly in the county and national calendar, which is what you would expect of a links with this record that happens to sit inside a town with a railway station and a supply of hotel beds. The amateur calendar and what qualifies a player for it are covered in our guide to English amateur championships.
There is a practical consequence for a visitor, and it is not an obvious one. A club that stages championships keeps its rough at championship standard for part of the summer, because rough of that kind has to be grown months in advance rather than produced in a fortnight. Play Lytham in July and you are playing a course set up for people a great deal better than most of us. In April it is a kinder golf course on identical ground. Neither version is the fraudulent one, but the April version is where a mid-handicapper finds a score.
The closing holes and the pressure they apply
Lytham finishes uphill in difficulty even though the ground is flat. The last six holes run back towards the clubhouse and into what is usually the prevailing wind, they are long, and the bunkering tightens rather than eases.
The 15th is a long par four that plays longer. The 17th is the Bobby Jones hole, a dogleg with sandy waste and scrub on the right where a tee shot that leaks costs a stroke at best. The 18th is the hole that has broken the most players: a par four with a cluster of bunkers arranged across and around the approach, played to a green sitting directly in front of the red-brick clubhouse with windows full of people watching. There is no bail-out and no safe miss, and the visual pressure of that building is part of the design whether or not anyone intended it.
- 15thA long par four that plays longer still into the prevailing wind.
- 16thWhere Ballesteros drove into a temporary car park in 1979, took relief and made birdie.
- 17thThe Bobby Jones hole. Sandy waste and scrub right, where a tee shot that leaks costs a stroke at best.
- 18thBunkers across and around the approach, a green under the clubhouse windows, and no bail-out anywhere.
The character of the closing holes rather than their yardages, which change with the tee in use.
The 18th also demonstrates something about the club's character. Most modern championship venues have redesigned their finishing hole to make a spectacle. Lytham's finish is a spectacle because of where the clubhouse happens to stand and where the sand happened to be put more than a century ago, and nobody has felt the need to improve on it. The green is not enormous, the approach is not long, and the hole is nevertheless one of the hardest closers in British golf because of what is arranged around it.
Anyone who has watched an Open here will also have noticed how the crowd behaves on that last hole. The land is flat, so the galleries stack around the green and along the fairway rather than looking down from dunes. The effect is an enclosed, noisy, almost theatrical arena, quite different from the open amphitheatres of the dune courses, and players consistently describe it as the loudest walk in the championship.
The statistic that matters is the absence of a closing par five. Many championship courses give a player a chance to make up ground at the last. Lytham does not. Anyone behind with four to play has to make birdies on long par fours into the wind, which is why so many Opens here have been decided by the leader holding on rather than the chaser catching up.
Wind on a links that sits back from the sea
Being a mile inland changes the wind rather than removing it. There is no cliff-edge blast, but the Fylde is flat and open, and the wind arrives across the town in gusts rather than as a steady stream. Buildings and mature trees around the boundaries produce eddies, so the wind at the 1st tee and the wind at the 6th green can be doing different things on the same afternoon.
The prevailing direction means the outward half tends to play downwind and the inward half into it, which is the source of the standard Lytham advice: score early, survive late. A player who reaches the turn at level par into the wind has done something; a player who reaches it at level par downwind is already behind.
A caveat is honest here. Prevailing does not mean invariable, and a reversed wind at Lytham turns the course inside out: the outward half becomes a slog and the closing stretch becomes gettable. Several of the lowest rounds recorded in Opens at the club came on days when the wind was not doing what it usually does. Anyone planning strategy from a course guide written for the normal direction will be badly served on the days it is not normal, which is why the first thing to check on arrival is the flag on the 18th rather than the forecast on a phone.
There is a second-order effect worth knowing. Downwind into revetted bunkers is more dangerous than into wind, because the ball carries further and lands hotter, and the flat-faced traps that would be a comfortable carry into a breeze become exactly reachable with a helping one. Distance control on the outward half is therefore about not reaching the sand rather than about reaching the green.
Visitor access, the Dormy House and stay-and-play
Royal Lytham welcomes visitors on published days, booked directly with the club, and no member's introduction is required. A current handicap index is normally requested. The club keeps parts of the week for members, so availability is more restricted than at a resort course, and the practical constraint is lead time rather than eligibility.
The Dormy House is what makes Lytham distinctive among English championship clubs. It is on-site accommodation, run by the club, with bedrooms, dining and a bar, and it allows a visitor to stay at the golf club and play more than once without moving. Very few clubs in England offer that. It changes the character of a trip: instead of a single round squeezed between a drive and a hotel check-in, you get an evening, a dinner in the club, and a second round in different weather.
How a stay-and-play typically works
Packages are usually built as a number of nights with a number of rounds attached, sometimes including a round on a neighbouring course, with meals included. Group sizes are limited by the number of bedrooms, which is the real ceiling on booking a large society in. Availability follows the same seasonal pattern as everything else on this coast: high summer first, shoulder season best value.
The wider conventions for booking a round at a private English club — which ones need an introduction, what a handicap certificate has to show, how societies are handled — are set out in our guide to visitor access at English golf clubs.
How green fees and packages are typically structured
The pricing model at Lytham is the standard English championship one, and understanding its shape is more useful than any figure that would be out of date by next spring.
| Element | How it usually works |
|---|---|
| Peak green fee | Highest rate, high summer, limited visitor days |
| Shoulder season | Reduced rate in spring and early autumn |
| Winter rate | Lowest, often with temporary greens or preferred lies in play |
| Twilight | Reduced afternoon rate where daylight allows |
| Replay | Discounted second round on the same day |
| Stay-and-play | Dormy House nights bundled with rounds and meals |
Two things are worth flagging. Winter rates look attractive and can be genuine value, but a links in January may be playing to winter greens, and it is fair to ask what is in play before you book. And package pricing is not always cheaper than the sum of its parts; it is usually better value because of what is included rather than because of a discount. The general economics of English club pricing are covered in green fees in England explained.
Practice facilities and preparing to play there
There is a practice ground and short-game area, and the sensible preparation for Lytham is not the same as for most courses. Time spent hitting drivers is largely wasted, because you will not hit many. Time spent on bunker shots from a steep revetted face is the single highest-return use of a warm-up here.
The second thing to practise is the shot from thick rough with a short iron — not the heroic recovery, but the honest one that advances the ball a hundred metres back to the fairway. Amateurs lose more strokes at Lytham through failed recoveries than through poor driving.
Third, spend time on the putting green learning the pace. Links greens run truer and faster than most inland surfaces, and a visitor accustomed to slower, softer greens will leave the first four putts short and then run the next four past.
One further piece of preparation is mental rather than technical. Decide before you play what you will do when you find sand, and stick to it. The recurring visitor error at Lytham is attempting a heroic recovery from a revetted bunker, catching the face, and playing the next shot from the same bunker in a worse lie. Splashing out sideways to the fairway costs one stroke. Failing twice at the clever shot costs three, and it costs the rhythm of the next two holes as well.
A yardage book or a caddie is worth having. Several tee shots have blind or semi-blind landing areas where the correct line is a distant marker rather than anything you can see, and guessing costs more than the caddie fee. If you are visiting in the colder months, our guide to winter golf rules in England explains what preferred lies and temporary greens actually mean for your scorecard.
Nearby courses that make a Fylde coast trip worthwhile
Lytham does not sit in isolation. Fairhaven and St Annes Old Links are both within a few minutes and are proper links in their own right rather than makeweights. Blackpool North Shore is a short drive north. The strongest argument, though, is for pairing the Fylde with the Southport coast across the Ribble estuary: the drive around through Preston takes under an hour and delivers you to the densest run of championship links in England.
Blackpool is the practical base question. It is fifteen minutes away, has more hotel rooms than the rest of the Fylde combined, and is a great deal cheaper in the shoulder season than anywhere closer to the golf. Lytham St Annes itself is quieter, more expensive and within walking distance of the first tee. Neither is wrong; the choice usually comes down to whether the trip is four players in one car or a larger society that needs beds in volume. If the Dormy House has room for your group, take it, because staying inside the club is the version of this trip people talk about afterwards.
That combination — Lytham on one side of the water, Birkdale and Hillside on the other — gives you two distinct kinds of English links in the same trip. One is a bunkered, enclosed, positional golf course where the wrong club off the tee ruins a hole. The other is a dune-corridor course where the fairways are flat and the punishment is in the scrub. Our Royal Birkdale course guide covers the second, and if the trip is heading south instead, the Kent golf coast offers a third character again.
For anyone building a longer English golfing itinerary rather than a weekend, the seasonal question is the one to settle first, and our guide to the best time to play English links is the place to start. The rest of our coverage, from championship formats to club membership, sits in the golf section.