ELLIE HARRISON
Access to green spaces is vital for health, so is it time for ‘exclusive’ golf clubs to open up?
Access to green spaces is key to good health, so opening golf courses to the public would have wide-ranging benefits.
We started our picnic with a game of Mr Potato Head and finished it a few short minutes later, when we were shooed off by a golfer. At least I think he was a golfer, but his fancy-dress tartan billowing trousers and equally gauche jumper meant he could have been a pensioner at a stag do.
After I was asked whether I was from around here, I replied that, yes, I was born and raised here and, by the way, this was protected common land that I was being moved on from, in which was enshrined “the right of access for air and exercise” since the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, he had paid his subs, pointed at around 350 hectares of rough pasture being grazed by 500 head of cattle and to what was invisibly some part of a golf course
(for a mere 100 years) and declared that it was too dangerous for my infant son and I to stay.
I was ambivalent about golfers until then. In fact, both my wonderful grandfathers had played and my cousin was a scratch golfer in his teens, so I may have even felt warmly towards them, perhaps bought naff golf-related Christmas presents. But now I began to think much less of a sport that has a reputation for its players being older, wealthier men wanting to get out from under their wives’ feet. (Yes, I know it’s a stereotype: my 20-something cousin looks like a model and has been known to golf in sandals. And yes, Tiger Woods.)
Nevertheless, vast green golf courses are often for members to the exclusion of everybody else, so they are now under scrutiny as never before, with calls to open them to all at a time when they are closed for actual golf. In cities, more green space is desperately needed anyway, but particularly during the coronavirus crisis, so that people can get outside safely and easily. In London, recent research has found that golf courses amount to more than 4,450 hectares – the second largest category of green space in the city after parks and public gardens. And half of them are owned by councils and the Crown Estate, making it surely a pen-stroke away from the clean, green space people desperately need for physical strength and mental sanity in a mad world. Particularly amid cut-off-the-nose-to-spite-the-face decisions to close overcrowded parks. And because people in deprived areas have less access to gardens and green space, it is a matter of social justice, too.
NATURE-FRIENDLY GOLF COURSES
Across Britain, apart from taking a huge amount of land out of public access, could golf clubs at least be more useful for wildlife? The National Trust has just bought a former golf course on the Lincolnshire coast with the aim of creating a reserve for snipe, lapwings, oystercatchers and even spoonbills along their migratory route.
There are the ridiculous golf courses that look like they’ve been made with herbicide, nail scissors and subterranean blowers to optimise ground conditions and which cost £300,000 to join. But there are those making efforts for nature, such as restoring heathland in Hertfordshire and creating corridors for adders in the Midlands. Many golfers prefer it, as more natural ‘hazards’ make for a more challenging game. Many landowners do, too: artificial bunkers cost £20,000 to build.
And, for now, it’s down to those very landowners to decide how open or exclusionary their patch is. If a golf club pays more than farming carrots, what would any of us do? But in the bright tomorrow where new normal reigns, perhaps there will be fresh ideas about how to balance the books from paying golfers with fair access to the land.