Golf: Kingdom of strife

Alasdair Reid, The Sunday Times, 21 December 2003

St Andrews is turning into a golfing Disneyland say angry locals who claim a new course will be an ugly blot on the landscape.

Swaddled in waterproofs, and hunched against the rain, three golfers make their way up the 18th fairway of the Old Course at St Andrews. The old grey town is living up to its reputation on this chill December afternoon: the wind whistles up Granny Clark’s Wynd; breaking waves throw plumes of sea-spray across the West Sands and the R&A clubhouse sits squat and forbidding beneath a slate-hued, leaden sky. They walk towards the green: passing figures on a timeless canvas. In actual fact, their round on golf’s most celebrated venue has unfolded against a backdrop of acrimony, rancour and discontent in the Fife town that, by quirk of historical fate, has come to be known as the home of golf. Followers of the game across the globe may cherish the misty-eyed image of St Andrews as a bastion of permanence and traditional values, but the reality is one of harsh commercialism and attendant distrust.

St Andrews, as a centre of learning, religion and sport, has always had its underlying tensions. But since the announcement that the St Andrews Links Trust, the body charged with the responsibility of maintaining its historic courses, had drawn up plans for a new course on the southern outskirts of the town, those tensions have boiled to the surface. Opponents of the development — a loose coalition of environmentalists, hoteliers and even local golfers — claim that the new course is unnecessary, that its construction will place an ugly blot on a distinctive coastal landscape and that it will damage the legitimate interests of businesses in the area.

There is also a growing fear that St Andrews is being turned into what one critic called “a low-grade theme park” by the growth of new courses and all their associated buildings and signs. Ten years ago, a visitor might have to be told that the subtle swales of its idiosyncratic linksland landscape contained even one golf course, but to arrive in the town today is to have the senses assaulted by the sport. There are now 11 courses in the immediate area, five of them laid out in the past eight years, a proliferation that has led to worries that St Andrews is becoming nothing more than a golfing Disneyland.

That the Links Trust, a registered charity established by Act of Parliament in 1974, should be seen as part of the problem rather than the solution is offensive to many. So, too, is the way its role has changed, moving from benign custodianship of a precious asset into the hard-nosed world of big business. The trust, which first became embroiled in controversy a few years ago when it sold a package of Old Course tee times to the Keith Prowse ticket agency, had an income of £114,000 in its first year; by last year that had grown to £8.68m.

“It has become a huge money-making machine,” says Gordon Begg, a retired investment banker who had his own reasons to be grateful for golf’s inflationary allure last year, when he sold his modest house by the Old Course for more than £1m. “The Trust has charitable status, but it is now operating like a plc.

“They’ve put up two modern clubhouses, but their facilities and their merchandising take trade away from other local restaurants and shops. You can even hire the clubhouses for weddings and all sorts of things, and I’m sure that’s not what was intended when they were set up all those years ago. They’re generating so much cash that they have to spend it somewhere, and that’s what the new course is really about.”

Jonathan Stapleton, general manager of the Old Course Hotel, has been one of the Trust’s fiercest critics, believing their actions have restricted numbers on the Duke’s course he operates. By last week, he had softened his tone after assurances that the Trust and private businesses would do more to work together, but he remains sceptical about the new course.

“We have to work together, but I still have reservations,” Stapleton says. “If it were a purely commercial course, I don’t see that it would survive in the current marketplace. Tourism is down, especially from the US, and a new course will simply dilute things further. We have to face facts: the cake hasn’t got any bigger.”

The Links Trust’s response is that the new course is not designed primarily for tourists, but to cope with increased demand from local players. “There seems to be an unwillingness among certain people on the tourism side of this town to understand that we’re not building a course for tourists,” explains Peter Mason, the trust’s external relations manager. “All the other courses built recently have been set up for visitors, but that’s not what we ’re doing. We’re dealing with the extra demand we get from local golfers.”

The Trust supports their case with figures that show an 11% growth in the town’s population over the past four years and highlights a 25% increase in total rounds played on their existing six courses since 1995. However, the selection of 1995 — when St Andrews hosted the Open Championship — as a start point suggests sharper growth than has actually taken place recently. The increase in total rounds played is only 1.3% if 1997 is used as the base year for calculations.

“For planning purposes, they have to demonstrate unmet demand,” says Terence Lee, a semi-retired professor of psychology who lives near the site of the proposed course. “They have come up with figures for rounds played, but in my view they do not suggest significant growth at all. The numbers go up and down and they’ve been presented in a way that exaggerates what little growth there has been.

” Professor Lee, a member of the St Andrews Green Belt Forum, cites the under-use of facilities at a number of commercial courses in the area in support of his argument against the new project. However, as his specialist field is environmental psychology, the human impact of developments, he has professional concerns about its consequences.

In the past 10 years, four new courses have been constructed along the 10-mile stretch of coastline between St Andrews and Crail, and proposals for another, an exclusive American development, have also been tabled. “I know that two other farmers in the area have been approached,” continues Professor Lee. “From the work I have done on the perception of landscape, people do not think of a golf course as open, natural country, and that’s what we’re in danger of losing. Even the local golfers are saying enough is enough.”

The most startling newcomer to the Fife golf scene is the St Andrews Bay Hotel complex, four miles south of the town. It comprises two courses and a hotel that, according to local rumour, was based on the design of a similar facility in Atlanta, Georgia. “It’s completely out of scale, a bit like an airport terminal,” says Professor Lee. “An ugly great lump of corporate America dumped on a Fife hillside,” says another local resident.

The Trust, however, does not consider such issues to be part of its remit. “I know people talk about the Disneyland thing,” says Mason, “but is it a concern? That’s a question for the planners, not for us. We have certain duties under the Act of Parliament. The Act does not talk about preserving character as such, it says the trust has to hold the Links as a public resort and recreation for the people of St Andrews and visitors. It’s not something that is our issue.”

Nor is Mason impressed by the argument that the trust uses its charitable status unfairly. “Just what advantage does that give us?” he asks. “Ok, we don’t pay tax, so our costs and prices should be lower. But the reality is that we don’t use that financial advantage for anything other than generating surpluses to reinvest in these links.

“Nobody else in the area provides for local golfers. If the proportion of local golfers grows then visitors are pushed out and that affects everyone. The entire product, the St Andrews golf experience, suffers too.”

According to Begg, however, the reverse scenario is more realistic. “The Trust has taken that clause about catering for visitors far further than was ever intended. They might operate by the letter of the Act, but are they operating in its spirit? Local people don’t want this new course. The fact of the matter is that the trust can make a lot more money off visitors, who pay for one round of the Old Course what a local pays for a year’s ticket, so the more they free up their existing courses for visitors to play then the more they will make.”

Life and golf will go on in St Andrews. But there is a clear and growing danger that its greatest attraction, that sense of glorious improbability visitors feel when they find a sport’s most revered acres at the end of a side-street in an otherwise unremarkable Scottish town, will be diminished if action is not taken soon. For many, especially those who have seen the over-manicured courses and gaudy sprawls of developments in America, the lesson to be learnt is that less is usually more in golf.

But according to Begg, the damage has already been done. “I think it’s gone past that point,” he says, shaking his head. “You think of all the great names associated with this place, of Bobby Jones and Tom Morris and all the rest of them. I think they would turn in their graves if they could see what’s happening here today. It was never meant to be this way.”