"Who owns London's golf courses?"

[Beckenham Place Park, a former golf course turned into a public park by its owner, Lewisham Council.]

"Half the golf courses in Greater London are owned by councils or the Crown Estate, a new investigation by Who Owns England can reveal. 

The findings add further impetus to growing calls for golf courses and other private green spaces to be opened up to the public during the coronavirus crisis, so that there is more space to safely exercise in...

              [Golf courses (red) vs existing public parks & gardens (green) in Greater London.]

The lockdown has highlighted how access to nature is a fundamental human need – there’s mountains of evidence on the physical and mental health benefits of getting outdoors – and the fact that this is a matter of social justice: people in deprived areas have smaller gardens and less access to green space.

In the context of this emerging debate, let’s take a look at who owns London’s golf courses, and whether they could be readily persuaded to open up to a wider public.

THE OWNERS OF LONDON’S GOLF COURSES: FROM HARROW TO IMPERIAL TOBACCO

To uncover who owns London’s golf courses, I took Ordnance Survey’s Greenspace dataset, extracted just golf courses, clipped this with the GLA boundary, cleaned up a couple of errors in the dataset where polygons overlapped, and measured the area of each course. I then cross-checked the resulting 131 golf courses against Land Registry’s Corporate & Commercial dataset to uncover the owners. The full results are in this Google Spreadsheet.

Here’s the headline findings:

Golf course owners in Greater London	Acres	Percent
Corporate / private	5,122	45%
Councils	4,702	42%
Crown Estate	853	8%
Split 50/50 council & private owner	363	3%
Unknown ownership:	270	2%
Total	11,310 acres	100%

Whilst most of the corporate owners are simply fee-paying golf clubs, there are also some intriguing names, including:

• Harrow School;
• Dulwich College, who have commendably already opened up their sports fields for the public;
• Imperial Tobacco’s pension fund, owners of Selsdon Park golf course (who knew Big Tobacco cared about outdoor exercise?);
• and Du Parcq (Jersey) Ltd, owners of Brockley Hill Golf Park, registered in the offshore tax haven of Jersey.

The Crown Estate own golf courses at Hampton Court, Richmond Park, and Eltham, amongst others.

But to me the most interesting owners are the councils. Hillingdon, Enfield and Barnet are the top three London councils who own the most acres of golf course. And Bexley, Brent, Bromley, the City of London Corporation, Croydon, Ealing, Harrow, Havering, Hounslow, Kingston, Lee Valley, Lewisham, Redbridge, Richmond, Sutton, Waltham Forest – together they own thousands of acres of golf courses. They could all be opening this up immediately, if they chose to, to create more space for safer exercise. So why don’t they?

If you’d like to see this change, please sign and share my petition!"

Source here.