On Shifting Sands: Is Your Golf Course in the Wrong Place?

Back in 1990, just one year after the publication of the R&A’s ‘The Demand for Golf’, I got a job at the first driving range to open in the Highlands of Scotland, on the outskirts of Inverness. At this time the R&A predicted that 691 new 18-hole courses would be needed by 2000 across the UK in order to meet growing demand and the new driving range, officially opened by Sam Torrance, was part of this growth.

Sometime after I started working at the driving range, I found myself cutting the fairways of a new golf course in addition to my ball collecting duties. I learned all sorts of things about gang mowers and tractors as well as how to bait driving range patrons into using up their balls by trying to hit my well-caged ball collecting quad bike. Ball machine tokens were selling by the dozen and my throttle control was unsurpassed.

Clearly, the 1980s golf boom, inspired by the successes of Lyle, Woosnam and Faldo had created an unstoppable growth phase for the game, with shiny new facilities and long club membership waiting lists as it headed into the next millennium. Well, things didn’t quite turn out that way. At least not for everyone.

Fast forward 35 years and the driving range is now surrounded by new housing developments, very well connected by a new road, and is no longer at the city limits. The population of Inverness has boomed and is significantly wealthier than in 1990. Yet the golf course is now down to a 9-hole layout and in a region that attracts golfers from around the world, it struggles to compete with other local options. This kind of story could easily be dismissed as anecdote or unrepresentative example if it wasn’t for the fact that it has been repeated across the country over the past few decades. So what’s going on?

A venue that was in theory perfectly positioned geographically, economically and at the right time in history finds itself fighting to maintain a profitable golf course. The specifics of one example are much less important than the big picture here. In short, the future turned out a little bit differently than we might have expected. This kind of story has been replicated across the UK and despite differences in management, climate and local economic contexts (we tend to think of these as shifting sands) common themes emerge if you look closely at what has happened at many venues across the UK.

What might seem like bad management or poor decision making at the club level is often much more related to shifting sands that clubs themselves can do nothing about.

So in this Custodian Golf blog we’re taking a step back to look at the big picture to ask whether anything can be done.

The big picture – context is everything

Across Great Britain today there are about 2,600 golf courses. Getting to an exact number is somewhat complicated because you need to keep track of all the course closures, new courses and those clubs that have par 3 courses and the like. But 2,600 is a useful headline number and this is what we have in the Custodian Golf database, as well as our list of more than 100 recently closed courses. For every course we have a full range of data, including catchment populations, weather data, local competition and so on. But if we want to understand things properly, we need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

The UK population as of 2025 is approximately 68 million but if we go back to 1990, when I began my time as a young driving range assistant, the population was about 57 million. Yet since we are talking about golf this is not the most important statistic at all. What we really need to understand is how the composition, characteristics and geography of the population has changed and how this feeds through to memberships. For a while, as the baby boomers progressed upwards on the population pyramid, grew richer and suburbanised, the 1980s golf boom made a lot of sense.

As this generation became richer and their children got older they had the money and time to play more golf. But they were not being replaced in member clubs at a high enough rate and, prior to COVID, many courses were in a perilous financial situation – as many still are. The COVID sticking-plaster has provided some relief, but we would argue that it has only really offered a temporary slowdown of long terms trends that, unless they are seriously addressed, could have a hugely detrimental impact upon golf clubs across the country – and the game of golf at all levels in the longer term.

At this point, the statistically inclined amongst you might be tempted to divide 68 million by 2,600 in order to get a ‘courses per capita’ figure, and that would be understandable – but it would also be unhelpful. It’s very well known that the golf club member demographic is unrepresentative of wider society, despite the growing diversity of non-members and off-course golfers. Given that 85% of golf course members are male and nearly two thirds of members are over 50 we need to consider what the implications of this are for the future. In a previous post we also wrote about the uneven geography of golf across the country and how it’s not just a reflection of underlying population patterns.

Put simply, we see the demographic situation as something of a ticking timebomb. The only problem is that the bomb has already gone off and nobody seems to be taking the long-term, strategic view with a serious plan on what to do about it. Yes, we have some nice, well-written PDFs and some high-level conversations on these topics but really what all of this brings to mind for us, based on studying the data for the past two years, is the famous quote about planting a tree.

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now”

At Custodian Golf, we are first and foremost concerned about the future and sustainability of this great game and our hope is that pieces like this will provoke more serious action by individual clubs and governing bodies about the future of the sport. We can’t claim to have all the answers, but we do believe we are asking the right questions, as awkward and blunt as they may be.

The population of the UK has changed significantly in size and in composition over the past four decades. Geodemographic shifts are ongoing. Some previously booming seaside towns with great golf courses are now highly deprived, with weak local economies. This has a direct impact on golf club sustainability even without considering other very pressing issues like climate change and water scarcity.

Cultural and social norms have also changed dramatically since the golf boom of the 1980s and the expansion of the 1990s. Technology has offered previously unimaginable new opportunities. The level of local competition has in most cases intensified, whether that is new golf venues or other leisure facilities.

In short, the game of golf is operating on shifting sands and unless we recognise this and do something about it at club and country level the future for a significant number of clubs may be bleak.

Think about your local area

Gosh, those Custodian Golf guys are real killjoys, aren’t they? Well, we would understand if you say that but just take a moment to think about your own local region.

Can you think of golf facilities that have struggled or even shut down in recent years? How about the club you play at? For me, one of the courses I played as a junior golfer is now gone forever, sacrificed to make way for a growing city’s transport infrastructure. Another course near where I now live closed for good in the past 18 months due to perennial flooding – a very sad demise after more than 100 years of play. If you read our closed courses blog you will find many more examples, including several municipals.

If you also consider new golf facilities that have opened or expanded near you in the past few years then perhaps you will think about driving ranges with Trackman or Top Tracer, or pay and play courses. This is where the future for golf is much more hopeful. Diverse, young, fun, even fashionable! Yet the disconnect between this kind of off-course golf and traditional golf course membership is real and there are no signs of the gap being bridged. This presents a real challenge and one that Custodian Golf take seriously.

All of which brings us to the point where we ask another slightly uncomfortable question. 

Geography matters, but history is important too

The uncomfortable bonus question we’d like to pose is as follows:

“Is your golf course in the wrong time?”

Yes, it could very well be true that your golf course is now in the wrong place, for any number of reasons, and relocation could be the solution. But it’s also the case that for many clubs the ways of the past are a barrier to future growth and survival. They might be basic things like membership composition by age, lack of a dynamic junior section or it could be more easily fixable things like overly-strict dress codes, clubhouse catering or lack of diversity on committees. ‘Diversity’ in this case could simply be making sure that all ages are represented on committees and that the strategic direction of clubs takes a more long-term view. 

Many clubs do see the big picture and are planning ahead, but many others are focused on the minutiae rather than the macro. Spending more time on questions like ‘who will replace the 15% of our playing members who are over 80?’ than ‘should we allow these types of shoes in the clubhouse?’ might be a good place to start. For some clubs, then, relocation could simply mean relocating from the past to the present, with one eye on the future. 

For a small subset of the 2,600 clubs in the UK, much of what we write here doesn’t really matter. They might take in £3m a year in visitor fees, be able to charge over £300 a round, or perhaps they are just so well off they don’t even need visitors. They may be so elite that you can’t even join unless you are an ultra-high-net-worth individual (UHNWI). But this only applies to a tiny minority. For the rest, even many prestigious clubs, we believe that most of what we write here is relevant.

So, in addition to asking whether your golf club is in the wrong place, it is a worthwhile exercise asking whether it is also stuck in the past and, if so, what you might do to modernise and bring about a new era of growth and commercial success. Clubs can often do very little about being in the wrong place, apart from relocation, but they can move from the past to the present with some more flexible thinking.

Just as there are many different ways of putting a little ball in a four-and- a-quarter inch hole, there are many possible futures for UK golf. We’re here to help make sure it’s a bright one.

What can be done?

It’s easy to point out problems and shout from the sidelines, but at Custodian Golf we believe in positive action. Despite the apparent doom and gloom we present here, we are actually very positive about the future of golf in the UK – so long as stakeholders at all levels begin to accept the need for serious action. On this point, we frame the solution to golf’s geographic and demographic problems around three options:

• Reposition – this is where we work with clubs to establish the current brand and market position, think about things like how a club operates and then build a strategic delivery plan to assist a club’s evolution towards a more sustainable business model.

  
  

• Repurpose – this can mean things like releasing spare land, or extending and reformatting courses – as well as making better use of existing assets to modernise and improve a venue.

• Relocate – sometimes the best solution is a complete relocation. Not many clubs in the UK have been through this but one member of our team led the wholesale relocation of Royal Norwich Golf Club in the past decade and we are currently working with a number of other clubs who are considering relocation.

None of these options are quick or easy, and we recognise this. Phil Grice, the Custodian Golf Head of Venues – and former Club Manager – understands this only too well.

But doing nothing is the fourth option and it could, for many clubs, lead to a downward spiral of decline. The height of the golfing season is a very difficult time to be thinking about the topics we raise here but they must be part of strategic discussions at all levels if we are to sustain and grow the game. This applies whether you are an elite UK venue with a large international visitor base (have you modelled the financial impact of volatility in golf tourism activity or future conflict or pandemics?) or a local club with threadbare facilities and wafer-thin profit margins (what impact would a 20% rise in wholesale gas prices have? Or a 50% increase in the price of sand?).

To end this piece, I will defer to Jim Arthur – legendary agronomist and a man of substantial wisdom who at the time of that famous 1989 R&A report wrote the following:

“Equally, one must admit that in periods of enormous change, it ill behoves anyone to stick rigidly to the precepts which governed previous decades.”

This ‘protect the future by studying the past’ approach to golf club management is a central element of what we do at Custodian Golf. If you want to start a conversation about the future of your club, whatever that may be, we’d very much like to hear from you.

Alasdair Rae

Head of Data at Custodian Golf

June 2025

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Contact Phil Grice on 01223 776101 or phil.grice@custodiangolf.co.uk.