Golf Course Architecture - Issue 64, April 2021

53 signatures. Despite this, the council closed the course at the end of 2020, citing a cost saving of £69,000 a year, though campaigners point out that maintaining the park is estimated to cost £32,000, with no prospect of making any compensating revenue. Campaigners say that the council’s pre-closure consultation stated 75 per cent support to keep the course open, and that four bidders wanted to take it over – and that at least three more have emerged since the story broke. They also claim that opposition parties have agreed to revoke the closure if they take control of the (closely fought) council at forthcoming local election. This campaign appears still to have further to run. Across the Atlantic too, the muni revival is gathering pace. Americans trying to revive munis have one key advantage: the sheer number of such courses with an interesting architectural heritage. While it is true that pioneer American architects such as Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor worked almost exclusively for rather elite private clubs, that isn’t true of some of the great names that followed them. Donald Ross, for example (the man who, more than anyone else, brought great golf to the masses of America), designed around 400 courses through his long career – and almost fifty of them are or were munis. There are a number of projects afoot to regenerate Ross, or Ross-linked munis, especially some of those located in areas that are now relatively economically disadvantaged: this is because a number of people in the golf business have realised what a powerful engine a golf course can be to regenerate an area. The story of the Cobbs Creek municipal course in Philadelphia is well-known, but deserves to be repeated. Cobbs Creek opened in 1916, built by a lot of the same men that created American golf legends such as Pine Valley and Merion, including Hugh Wilson, principal designer of Merion East, and George Crump, founder, developer and the brains behind Pine Valley. It was viewed by many in its early years as the best public course in America. Cobbs was home to some of America’s pioneering black and female golfers, including Charlie Sifford, the first black member of the PGA Tour. Like so many old publics, Cobbs fell on hard times, but for years now a group of local golf enthusiasts have been agitating and fundraising with the aim of restoring the course. And now, they are on the verge of achieving their aim: currently in the final permitting stage, the project, to be led by Jim Wagner of Hanse Golf Course Design, could break ground as early as May of this year, starting with the restoration of the eponymous creek, by some distance the most difficult and costly partly of the project. Cobbs is far from being the grand old muni tagged for restoration in the US. In Washington DC, Walter Travis’s East Potomac Park, on an island in the Potomac River, is slated for a It would require little work to restore Colt’s original routing at Allestree Park Photos: saveallestreegolfcourse.co.uk