Golf Course Architecture - Issue 66, October 2021

WELCOME 1 ADAM LAWRENCE Back on the road again T he effect that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on the world as a whole has been so profound that to complain about its impact on GCA ’s operations seems a little bit pitiful. But nonetheless, the last eighteen months has been a very odd time to be trying to write a global magazine. Since we started publishing, way back in 2005, our On Site course reviews have been a very fundamental and much appreciated part of our offer. I personally had got into the habit of travelling to see golf courses on a very regular basis: my busiest year was, I think, 2015, when I visited 13 countries. I went to Singapore to see Kevin Ramsey and David Dale’s rebuild of the Seletar Country Club in March 2020, at which time the first stirrings of the pandemic were being heard across Europe. Asia, of course, had it sooner, and although the city-state was not in any sense locked down, temperature checks were required before one could enter a bar or restaurant. Little did I know, when I returned from Singapore, that only four days later, Prime Minister Boris Johnson would announce Britain’s first lockdown, and that I would not get on a plane again for more than eighteen months. Nor, to be fair, did I have the slightest inkling that being confined to home for weeks on end would spur people around the world to rediscover the joys of golf, setting the game on a firm upward trend for the first time in more than a decade. I am not Panglossian enough to believe that the pandemic has solved all of golf ’s problems. We still face the same issues; too slow, too expensive, too associated with middle aged and elderly white men. But, at the very least, what the Covid- fuelled boom has done for golf is to buy us some breathing space. With cash registers fuller and would-be members knocking on the door of clubs, we have the chance to fix the fundamental problems that golf has, without it being quite so adapt-immediately-or-die. As you will see elsewhere in this issue, my return to travelling, although not a long-haul trip, was very much worthwhile – I would go a long, long way to see a golf course as good as St Patrick’s Links. Maybe being in suspended animation for a year and a half isn’t the worst thing in the world after all.