We should reclaim all London land used for golf

The city of London is seen from Sundridge Park Golf Course.. Image shot 2012. Exact date unknown.
The city of London seen from Sundridge Park Golf Course
Alamy Stock Photo
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It is time to declare war on golfers.

For too long Londoners have sat in pubs wondering what’s responsible for the city’s sky-high house prices. Is it Sadiq Khan, is it Rishi Sunak, is it greedy property developers, is it planning law, is it quantitative easing? It is none of those things: the real answer is golfers and golf courses.

According to Ordnance Survey data, some 11,000 acres of land in Greater London is given over to golfing, across 131 clubs. That’s more than double the size of the borough of Hackney — population 260,000. Space to build homes for more than half a million Londoners has been handed to a few thousand men who prance about with metal sticks. They, I have come to the reluctant conclusion, are the single biggest obstacle to many middle-income Londoners getting on the housing ladder.

The average London nine-hole course is big enough to accommodate 42 football fields or 671 tennis courts

From where did golfers get their sacred rights to these vast expanses? It’s not clear to me. No other sport demands so much land to be enjoyed by so few people. The average London nine-hole course is big enough to accommodate 42 football fields or 671 tennis courts.

And let’s not forget the huge environmental costs of these sites. Many were created at the expense of destroying dense woodlands, replete with beautiful fauna and flora. Now they sit as carefully mowed lawns, bereft of biodiversity and requiring huge volumes of water to keep them maintained.

We ought to seize and rewild the great majority of these spaces, returning them to their natural state for Londoners to roam, while the areas formerly occupied by clubhouses could be turned into stunning blocks of flats. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of new homes could be built, making London greener at the same time. The air would be made so much cleaner with the planting of millions of new trees — we may not even need Ulez after all.

It’s a win-win, every way you look at it. Except, of course, for the small but mighty bit of our population who like golf. It may not be easy to prise them from their courses.

But the answer to our housing crisis could depend on it.

Simon Hunt is the Evening Standard’s business and technology correspondent

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