Golf or Houses?

 Golf courses in London make up an area larger than the borough of Brent and there is enough space on publicly owned courses to house 300,000 people.

Nearly half of the capital’s 94 active golf courses are owned by London boroughs or other public bodies, such as the Church Commissioners, and yet serve a tiny fraction of the capital’s 9 million residents.

The 43 publicly owned golf courses in London take up just under 1,600 hectares (3,950 acres) of land in Greater London, bigger than the borough of Hammersmith & Fulham, which has a population of 185,000.

The borough of Enfield alone contains seven courses, but the council receives just £13,500 from Enfield golf club each year to rent its 39-hectare golf course – less than the typical annual rent for a two-bedroom flat in the area.

Russell Curtis, the author of “Golf Belt”, a new study of how London’s golf courses could help address the housing crisis, said he was not calling for all the capital’s golf courses to be turned into housing but that some courses could be made more accessible to the capital’s residents if they became allotments, biodiverse green space, sports facilities or even urban farms.

Said Curtis, “There surely has to be a way of improving the social utility and accessibility of golf courses to benefit the wider population. The redevelopment of golf courses is always presented as a binary choice between beautiful green fields or concrete, but there’s a model in the middle where you could provide new homes and social infrastructure while achieving biodiversity gain.”

Building at a density of 60 homes per hectare on publicly owned golf courses that fall within areas designated as suitable for further development by the London Mayor’s local plan – close to railway stations, for instance – would provide homes for 101,700 people. 

Guy Shrubsole, the author of Who Owns England?, said: “With so much of London devoted to golf courses only used by a small segment of society, surely councils should be repurposing more of them as public parks and nature reserves, with open access for all.”

Britain is home to a quarter of all the golf courses in Europe, with one in 20 found in London, despite the capital making up just 0.65% of the UK’s total land area.

London golf courses could provide homes for 300,000 people, study says | Planning policy | The Guardian