Golf clubs are closing down all over Britain as middle-aged men swap their snazzy jumpers and clubs for Lycra biking gear.
Some of the UK’s biggest private housebuilders are snapping up failing golf courses for residential development when the owners of clubs sell out.
Between 2004 and 2013, one in five golfers in England gave up their club membership, according to England Golf, the governing body, with numbers falling from 882,184 to 707,424. Many have done so explicitly to “ride a bike”.
Golf Club Management, which reports on the golfing industry, has said that the number of golf rounds played in the UK in the final quarter of last year was down significantly on 2014.
David Thomas, chief executive of Barratt Homes, said the “Tiger Woods boom” that fuelled the craze for golfing in the early 2000s had disappeared as a combination of the rise of alternative sports such as cycling and rising club fees hit demand.
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“Golf course membership is down by 20 per cent over the past ten years. I think if you look at the history, it was perhaps the Tiger Woods boom — lots and lots of people joined golf clubs but now membership has dropped dramatically,” Mr Thomas said.
Barratt is redeveloping a former golf course in Mount Oswald, Durham, into 180 four-to-five-bedroom homes. It also recently made an offer to members of Cambuslang Golf Club in Glasgow of £20,000 each to buy land.
Mr Thomas said golf courses were “unquestionably being made available for sale” and said it was the latest sector to become available to housebuilders.
“It goes in phases according to changing land use," he added. “We had times when we were buying lots of bakeries. It just depends as to the ebb and flow of different sectors.
Redrow, another major housebuilder, recently bought a golf course in Tamworth, Staffordshire. The 148-hectare site will provide 1,100 homes.
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While the trend is a double-bogey for golf fans, it could help to solve Britain’s chronic housing shortage.
A report by the Adam Smith Institute recommended that more golf courses on protected green land should be sold off. Tom Papworth, the author, said: “We have to choose whether to protect valuable inner-city green space or sacrifice our parks for the sake of low-grade farmland, golf courses and already-developed sites that happen to have once been classified as greenbelt.”
