Sense of Place

Understanding the landscape character of a site is essential to ensuring the sustainability of the golf course located on it.
By Nigel Henbury, EIGCA Senior Member

Now more than ever the fabric of our countryside, coastline and townscape is revealed before our eyes by the generation of television programmes with airborne content.

For many people we are sure it makes for dramatic, dynamic viewing.

More specifically, technological advances in the mapping and publication of aerial survey information can enable designers to immediately contextualise their simply drawn plans into the ‘virtual world’.

Does that mean the true skill of the design professional to derive and then integrate projects appropriately into the physical landscape is diminished or any less appreciated?

Does that mean policy makers, depending upon your viewpoint, planning, preserving, enhancing, sustaining the heritage of our landscape will be better informed to appraise the impact of any proposed development?

Land supports cities, towns, villages, infrastructure, gives us crop food, supports livestock, wildlife gives us recreational space and dumping grounds. The ‘land fabric’ is a matrix of economic and sociological development and succession management.

Recent policy in the UK has meant the introduction of the Landscape Character Type (LCT) and Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) to communicate the understanding and appreciation of our landscape heritage and guide future planning policy accordingly. It should be regarded as a common sense reference for any project professionals designing with and in the landform.

Much has been written about and practised concerning the presentation of golfing areas. Outside of these areas , should every golf course in the UK have dynamic policy linked to LCA, enabling Club officers (and their consultants) to focus on the landscape in which their golf course is set out and promote the contribution their facility makes and can continue to make to the landscape heritage of the locality?

A practical method of application to derive the LCT of a golf course would be to identify Key Characteristics: designations, macro landform, habitats, distant views – Distinctive Features: contouring, landmark trees, strong visual golf holes – Intrusive Elements: neighbouring land uses, restrictive covenants, riparian ownership.

The next stage would be to carry out the LCA; firstly the fabric of the golf course and beyond to its boundaries to better understand visual unity, cultural, ecological and functional integrity and secondly its sensitivity; distinctiveness, continuity, sense of place, landform, texture, tree cover, visibility between golf holes.

From this assessment, informed policy can be derived to work with the dynamics of nature by strategic succession management contributing greatly to a sustainable maintenance effort on and off the golf course.

The UK has a variety of golfing stock and golf courses exist and operate for a variety of reasons, but each have the potential to work with the forces of nature to improve. An educated programme of succession management is required for each.

Let us consider some typologies

• The composition of the finest golf layouts and beautiful places to be in the British Isles have been realised in duneland and heathland, where golf is on the edge with, but also somehow perfectly comfortable with the indigenous vegetation and dynamics of nature.
• Estuarine locations, free draining vale and downland golf courses have the elements of wilderness to excite and enjoy and indigenous fine turf grass species
• Inland courses serving urban connurbations – sites specifically selected with rolling elevation change and perhaps the eccentricity of landforms from a previous use, standing the test of time, resisting the encroachment of urban development, but accessible to all from that neighbourhood to the present day
• Remote community golf courses
• ‘Greenfield golf courses’ – located as a by-product of contemporary town planning or development growth legacy
• ‘Resort Golf Courses’ – a business location criteria determined by potential for mix with other recreational activities
• The ‘debenture generation’ - business location criteria determined by potential for mix with other recreational activities and /or to be a tour venue – the more earth moved the better the chances of the latter.

In the first of our typologies, the succession management of existing habitats is key to the ecology and Landscape Character - the programme therefore has to consider every square meter of the site. In the final typology, it is likely that the design demanded that the character of the existing landscape was changed for whatever reason and therefore the propriety of the new Landscape Character has to be derived from scratch and proven.

A core skill of the professional designer is to envisage the project required to deliver the Landscape Character of the golf course through one, five, 10, 20 years and beyond and why a policy of sustainable maintenance and management of playing surfaces and out of play areas should be a priority of the developer and Club alike for their asset.

Conversely a prolonged period of time without succession management being applied to the golf course or potential golf development site demands a second core skill of the designer. This is to investigate the potential, derive and communicate with conviction the reintroduction of parts of the golf course property lost to aggressive, invasive vegetation, for the benefit of reclaiming space, improved visual composition and diversifying ecology. The second, third and fourth typologies are the most likely to provide classic examples of this phenomenon. If you are a development committee chairperson or project manager contemplating an improvement or development, carrying out some desk research of old land mapping and photographs can be useful initial reference material for objective themes of improvement.

The Golden Age of golf course architecture undoubtedly took the lion’s share of the prime sites for robust golf course architecture. Therefore the fifth and sixth typologies are some way down the classification of land suitable for sustainable year round golf, but through dedicated effort they continue to provide a focus for the game and - with the benefit of considerable investment in the course - at the highest level of competition, notably The Belfry and Loch Lomond.

However the majority of the ‘greenfield’ or ‘resort’ courses constructed 30 -35 years ago should be approaching a threshold where the Landscape Character has reached a stage of maturity to define the golf holes. Decision makers need to look to the future – typically a tree programme, to thin out or remove the ornamentals and encourage the hardwoods, but the application of LCT and LCA may give a direction to the programme and link to other dynamics.

For the golf courses where succession management has not been an everyday or even seasonal priority, perhaps it should become so, but the physical impact and cost of the work to be done to begin to redress the balance will be scrutinised.

The third skill of the architect is to design and execute the propriety of that detail to a capital programme that is affordable and keeps disruption to a minimum.

In June 2007, Swan Golf Designs published their Environmental Policy Statement (EPS) – and in the context of physical landscape, golf course design and architecture is all about the detail of impact.

The baseline of the EPS, applicable to new projects and renovation projects alike is

• Identification of the physical forms in the landscape to be retained as motifs for the design
• Identification of the area subjected to earthworks
• Identification of golfing and non golfing zones
• Contour design manifest in horizons and catchments to stimulate visually and perform technically
• Correct specification of grasses
• Identification and specification of areas for planting or natural succession
• Creation of / maintenance of water bodies / courses.

The challenge of each project is to go out on site and search for, feel, see the motifs and if you find them, as a designer you have the basis of a statement.

Soon after the publication of their EPS, Swan Golf Designs became a Technical Supporter of GEE (now GEO). It was the first practice of golf course design and architecture to be so, regarded as testament to their commitment to design, specification and delivery of projects second to none, by the leaders in the pan - European environmental arena.

Since the ‘great land set – aside’ of the late eighties / early nineties, serious developers have had to be innovative to look for opportunities to commission golf projects of merit in challenging circumstances.

It is testament to the game of golf that opportunities, with good design and vision of the built form from the earliest design concepts, can be delivered in river flood plains, on restored opencast mines, on overburden sites, on redundant farmland and on existing golf courses using clean recycled wastes.

Golf courses can harmonize, integrate, reinvigorate, regenerate, and sustain the Landscape Character.

There is a proven track record of success.

Over time, it is hoped that appropriate and successful management or stewardship of the detail will continue to achieve a certifiable recognition at local, regional, national and international level that associated and influencing professions alike can take note of.

The golf course design and maintenance professions have responded well to the adverse publicity golf development generated almost twenty years ago, better educated and perhaps with relatively more time on their hands to focus on long term sustainable objectives with the existing stock the UK has. The relationship of golf with the landscape can only be strengthened and even better understood.

There is a lot of work to be done by all involved in the operation, maintenance and design of golf facilities to identify and obtain consensus for the long term sustainable objectives, put them into policy and deliver them through appropriate budgeting and programming.

It should be viewed as an exciting challenge for all concerned – in a world where man gets a buzz out of the phenomena of change – the landscape of the golf course is constantly dynamic and there is a requirement to respond on a planned basis.

This article originally appeared in Golf Club Management October 2008.