Battle for the soul of St. Andrews

Bradley S Klein, Golfweek, 1 May 1999

With two new courses just opened, a third under construction and four more under permit application, the tradition-bound town of St. Andrews is going through an identity crisis unlike anything in its storied past.

Some local heritage societies are calling for a development halt, while international businessmen line up waiting to cash in on lucrative opportunities.

Mistrust has extended to government authorities, especially because control over permitting has just been shifted from the Liberal Democrat-dominated local level to a regional level with a Labour Party majority. There is talk of “brown envelopes,” a Scottish euphemism for bribery, to explain the networking between businessmen and government. Many fear this medieval university town will be turned into a strip-mall variety golf theme park.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Frances Melville, a key figure in the local effort to monitor golf development. “All of these forces have converged on St. Andrews and everybody is talking about it. Phone and fax lines are buzzing off the hook.”

In a town rent by mistrust, with many golfers divided from non-golfers, Melville occupies an unusual vantage point. For one thing, she used to play golf – so well, in fact, that as a 2- handicap she regularly competed at the county level. Today, she prefers sailing when not working full-time as a public-relations administrator. And in her spare time? She is active politically as Liberal-Democrat councillor for St. Andrews and a member of the Fife East Area Development Committee.

Melville also occupies one of eight seats on the Links Management Trust, the independent board created in 1974 by act of Westminster Parliament to govern the day-to-day affairs of the St. Andrews public golf courses – all 99 holes, including the Old Course (1754), New (1894), Jubilee (1899), Eden (1913), Strathtyrum (1994) and the nine-hole Balgove (1971).

Like many people in this town of 13,000, Melville cherishes the classical look and feel of St. Andrews – and the fact that its legendary golf courses are all open to town and daily-fee play. Cathedrals dot this town, and golf shops coexist easily with aged university buildings. Three streets comprise downtown, where tourists, townsfolk and students ply the small shops.

The town enjoys a certain remoteness, largely because it occupies a semi-peninsula in the far northeast corner of Fife. Access is limited. Train service, which used to run up alongside the Old Course, was terminated in 1962. The five-mile road in from Leuchers is little more than one-lane in each direction, while the coast road is even more confined.

There was little public opposition three years ago when California-based businessmen Mark Parsinen and Art Dunkley secured permission to rebuild Kingsbarns Golf Links, a nine-hole layout dating to 1815 that had fallen into disuse during World War II. The expanded 18-hole facility was six miles down the coast and did not include a hotel or residences.

Kingask would. This proposed $85 million project on 520 acres of coastal farmland would include 36 holes of golf and a 230-room hotel and conference center only three miles from town center. Kingask prompted an uproar, largely because it would increase traffic along the coast road and bring so much new activity into town. The Fife region has chronically high unemployment rates, and the jobs would be a welcome addition to the larger economy. But citizen groups and officials within the town of St. Andrews were more concerned with the project’s effect on the pace of life, as well as on traffic and downtown commerce.

No one experiences the roller-coaster emotions of the day more than an affable, chain-smoking former journalist named Iain D. MacKinnon. Earlier in the decade he found himself on the Iraq-Kuwaiti border writing about the U.S.-led maneuver against Saddam Hussein. Now he’s the man out front for the Kingask seaside golf project and conference hotel.

“From Gulf War to golf war,” he says with a laugh as he surveys the windswept site.

When not bouncing around in his sport-utility vehicle ushering visitors around the 520-acre Kingask site, MacKinnon lobbies public officials, citizen groups and businessmen. His job is to secure planning approvals for the project on behalf of his employer, St. Andrews Bay Development Ltd. American hotel developer Don Panos is the main financial backer of the project.

The golf courses, to be routed over rather heavy clay, are being designed by Dennis Griffiths, with architectural consultancy by no less than three prominent golf figures: Bruce Devlin, Gene Sarazen and Sam Torrance. Negotiations have also begun to bring in Jack Nicklaus in some design capacity as well.

MacKinnon has his hands full just getting permits. “We already have permission for the golf courses,” he said. The hotel and conference center is another matter. A scaled-down version, from 230 rooms to 208, was denied permission by the Fife Council’s East Area Development Committee. But Kingask has appealed to the Secretary of State’s office. Meanwhile, plans for a further downsized version have been refiled.

Along the way, Kingask’s parking space request has gone from 100 to 300, and its plans for a new spa have been much expanded. And instead of going through the East Area office, the second application has been taken up by the Fife Council’s Strategic Development Committee. That move has local residents worried because unlike the conservative (i.e., Liberal-Democrat Party) majority locally, the Strategic Committee is Labour dominated.

On the heels of Kingask have come two other projects just as close to town, Feddinch and Scooniehill, that have furthered worries about the St. Andrews landscape.

Feddinch, a 430-acre inland site south of town, would include an 18-hole golf course, a 150-200 room hotel and conference center, plus 600 residential units. Questions already have been raised about Feddinch’s main financial backer, Michael Johnston of Dundee. As widely reported in the Scottish press, one of his businesses faces liquidation proceedings in Dundee (Superintendent News, March 19).

The local impact of Feddinch has also spawned concerns. “We would be talking strangulation,” said Dr. Frank Riddell, St. Andrews community councillor. “At Feddinch the effect of 600 holiday units would be to create a small town.”

Advocates of preserving the town’s traditional landscape include the Scottish Heritage Society, St. Andrews Preservation Trust and the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland. All have voiced concern about the proposed changes to the everyday aesthetics of life, and all have voiced opposition to new projects. Their concerns are found in articles and letters that have been appearing on a daily basis in The Courier and Advertiser of St. Andrews since mid-1998, when the controversy first broke out into the open. A steady stream of hearings and meetings has kept residents busy as well.

If some groups are driven by nostalgia for an idyllic image of St. Andrews, others are motivated by commercial interests. Among the groups involved are the St. Andrews Merchants Association, the St. Andrews Hotel and Guest Home Association, Fife Tourist Board, Fife Enterprises and the Scottish Tourist Board.

Caught in the middle is the noble group of golfers whose clubhouse presides, symbolically and structurally, over the Old Course at St. Andrews. The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews exercises no direct control over the 18-hole public layout that starts and ends at the west door of its two-story, granite clubhouse. But the R&A does have an interest in preserving the character of the Old Course, as well as in its own limited privileges for certain tee times there.

To preserve goodwill and ensure local golfers have continued access to linksland with the Old Course booked up routinely, the R&A has invested £1 million in developing Kingsbarns Golf Links. And in ways that spill beyond the R&A’s immediate function as a respected golf club, some individual members of the R&A are among the local businessmen with a financial stake in land development.

Demand for the Old Course far exceeds supply, but there is no chance of booking more than 42,000 rounds annually there. The course remains closed on Sundays – a tradition so sacred that no one has seriously proposed abandoning it. Despite the many other quality courses in town, overseas interest – and thus the demand for hotel beds – focuses on access to the Old Course. Except for a few, premium-priced tee times purchased in advance by tour operators, non-resident guests in town have to ballot for a precious tee time. The result, for all its attractiveness as an international golf mecca, is that guests often stay a few days in town, and often leave on Saturday because the course is unavailable on Sunday.

Efforts to develop alternative courses have met with limited success. The Old Course Hotel, located adjacent to the 17th (“Road”) hole, developed an inland layout in 1990 called The Dukes Course, designed by five-time British Open champion Peter Thomson. The inland layout drains poorly and bears scant resemblance to links golf. While pleasant enough, with its downhill views of the town and St. Andrews Bay, the Dukes Course simply does not suffice to hold visitors’ attention long enough to create an additional market. It remains to be seen if the other proposed courses can do better.

The lure of St. Andrews provides a powerful market impetus to any area developer. The cachet value of the Old Course, even if only in name, is enough to bring visitors, many of whom stand little if any chance of actually securing a tee time when they get here. But if access is limited, the “brand” labeling of St. Andrews proves a tempting mechanism by which a developer can attract upscale tourists and conference-goers.

Meanwhile, at least one government body is looking at individual projects within a long-term strategic plan. At the request of the Secretary of State, Fife Council Planning Service completed a comprehensive, if sketchy, 15-page document in October 1998 outlining a vision for St. Andrews that would guide considerations of permit applications. Hearings for the report generated an unprecedented response, about 900 in all. Among the issues evaluated were the housing market, transportation, green belt provisions and tourism.

The report concludes, among other things: “St. Andrews is at its landscape capacity and no major expansion should take place.” Moreover, it says, “Major new housing development would result in an unacceptable impact on the quality of the town’s environment.”

It remains to be seen whether the strategic study has the force of law, and whether its discussion for the town of St. Andrews governs developments beyond the immediate inner city. One thing is certain, however. There will be no major expansion of the road system into, or around, the town. Nick Bryan, Fife Council East Area development control officer, says “a ring road is not an issue at this point. There is no proposal for one and no money for it.”