49 part of the enormous Islamabad Smart City development near the country’s capital. “It is the best site I have worked on,” he says. “The differences in levels are incredible, and I have actually been able to leave a valley, or ‘canyon’, right in front of the clubhouse, with the ninth and eighteenth greens on either side. It has many natural rocky features and will have only natural indigenous vegetation. We have created many lakes to capture water during the monsoon, and there are already many types of birds that have appeared since we constructed the lakes.” It was some time before this that Peter made the move that would change his life. “I first came to Dubai in 1976, but it was not for golf,” he says. “I was building a course at Saint-Cyprien in the far south-west of France, not designed by me, and working for a contractor called VEB that did a lot of landscape construction, not just golf,” he explains. “They decided they wanted to open an office in the Middle East and, as I knew a fair bit about irrigation, I went out to set it up. I met a local Sheikh who said to me, ‘Peter, you’ve got to stay here, we’re going to build golf courses, plant trees and everything. We’ll start a company, and I will be your partner’. I didn’t believe him, but he agreed to my conditions for staying, and that’s why I’m still in Dubai. We opened our landscaping company in 1977, and Harradine Golf in Dubai started up in 1989.” His first projects in the Gulf were the Doha Golf Club in Qatar and the Abu Dhabi Golf Club, both of which were the first grass courses in their respective emirates. Doha started first, in 1995, and has been a regular feature on both the European men’s and ladies’ tours ever since. Abu Dhabi followed shortly afterwards; the course played host to the European Tour’s Abu Dhabi Championship from 2006-2021. “The project started in 1995, both the main National and the nine-hole Garden courses were built in 1998, and the club opened in 2000,” says Harradine. Since then, Harradine has made regular trips – at least monthly – back to Europe; he maintains an office in Switzerland, in Caslano, where he grew up. The globetrotting has got ever more intensive; apart from Harradine describes the site for his new course near Islamabad, Pakistan, as the best he has ever worked on Photo: Harradine Golf
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