1 WELCOME ADAM LAWRENCE It is more than 40 years since Ron Prichard basically invented the concept of restoring a golf course to its original design, at Texarkana Country Club in Arkansas. Since then, hundreds of courses, mostly in America (mostly originally designed by Donald Ross), have been ‘restored’ by any number of architects. Though golf architecture has its roots in the UK, the restoration movement has not really made any significant strides here. There are a number of reasons for this; principally, I think, the smaller amount of money available for course projects in the British market. Until recently, it has been hard to persuade British clubs to spend significant funds on their courses and, in truth, the UK has remained in thrall to the post-war design school of Robert Trent Jones and the like, that believed the old courses could, and should, be improved by alterations when funds were available. There have been projects with a historically sensitive mindset – the heathland courses of Surrey and Berkshire, for example, have mostly been trying to improve their stands of heather for some years – but they have not been big enough, or high profile enough, to constitute a ‘restoration movement’. And in many cases, even where projects have been sold as restorative, architects have proved unable to resist a little tinkering, claiming that the work ‘is what the original architect would have done if he were still here’ (which, I am afraid, is never more than speculation). In the last couple of years, though, we have seen one or two large-scale projects that could genuinely be called restorative break cover. The work at the Addington, which we profiled in January, is trailblazing, and more recently, St George’s Hill has appointed a team led by Renaissance Golf Design’s Brian Schneider, with a restorative brief. The latter is a reflection of a change in mindset: the club has been talking about restorative work for a long time, but has proved unwilling to press the button; perhaps it now will. And perhaps the post-Covid boom in golf, and the extra money that it has made available to clubs, will see the start of a genuine British restoration movement. Restored to glory?
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