Play Competitive Golf in the South East of England

The South East hosts the deepest amateur open calendar in England, with singles, pairs, mixed and team events held year-round across five counties: Hampshire, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey and Sussex. The choice of venues here is unmatched — an Open Championship rota links on the Kent coast, the Surrey/Berkshire sand belt running through some of the world’s greatest heathland courses, the chalk-based downland tracks of Sussex and Hampshire, and a dense network of parkland clubs around the M25 — meaning a competitive golfer can play opens on radically different terrain within the same county, often within the same week.

No part of England carries more competitive pedigree than the South East. Royal St George’s in Kent is the only Open Championship rota course in southern England and has hosted 15 Opens — only St Andrews, Prestwick and Muirfield have hosted more. Inland, the Surrey/Berkshire sand belt is the cradle of English heathland golf, where Willie Park Jr, Harry Colt, Herbert Fowler and James Braid laid out the courses that effectively defined the genre. Sussex and Hampshire add chalk-based downland tracks that drain freely all winter, while the M25 corridor places dozens of mature parkland courses within an hour of central London. For amateurs, the upshot is a region where the standard of conditioning, the depth of architectural pedigree, and the depth of fields in open competitions are all exceptionally high.

Royal St George’s Golf Club at Sandwich was founded in 1887 by Dr William Laidlaw Purves, a Scottish surgeon who spotted the dunes from the top of St Clement’s Church and set out to build an English rival to St Andrews. Seven years later it hosted the 1894 Open — the first ever played outside Scotland — and has since staged 15 Opens, more than any course outside the home of golf. Past Sandwich champions include Vardon (twice), Hagen (twice), Henry Cotton, Bobby Locke, Sandy Lyle, Greg Norman, Ben Curtis, Darren Clarke and Collin Morikawa. The 7,189-yard par-70 links is celebrated for its rumpled fairways, sweeping changes of direction (no two successive holes play the same way) and a remarkable set of bunkers — the 4th hole has the deepest bunker in championship golf. Other landmarks include “The Maiden” on the 6th, the “Suez Canal” crossing the 14th fairway and a bunker-less par-3 3rd, the only one of its kind on the current Open rota. Bernard Darwin, club president from 1952 to 1961, called it “my idea of heaven as is to be attained on an earthly links.”

Sharing the same stretch of Sandwich Bay coastline as Royal St George’s, Prince’s Golf Club opened in 1906 and was the first course in the UK built specifically for the new Haskell ball, stretching nearly 7,000 yards from the outset. The first ball was driven in 1907 by club captain A.J. Balfour — a former Prime Minister. Prince’s hosted The Open in 1932, won by Gene Sarazen, who famously debuted his newly invented sand wedge that week; the greenside bunker beside the present 9th green on the Himalayas nine was renamed the Sarazen Bunker in his honour by Pádraig Harrington in 2011. The original course was destroyed during the Second World War when the land was used as a battle training ground; Sir Guy Campbell and John Morrison rebuilt it in 1949 as the present 27-hole layout — Shore, Dunes and Himalayas — incorporating 17 of the original greens. More recently MacKenzie & Ebert have refreshed the Himalayas. Prince’s remains an Open Final Qualifying venue whenever The Open returns to Royal St George’s.

Sunningdale Golf Club, founded in 1900 on land leased from St John’s College, Cambridge, is widely regarded as the finest 36-hole inland club in the world. The Old Course was laid out by Willie Park Jr (two-time Open Champion) and opened in 1901, with Harry Colt — Sunningdale’s first secretary, chosen from 400 applicants — making influential revisions over the following two decades. The New Course, also a Colt design, opened in November 1923. The pair were among the first courses ever built away from the seaside, and proved that heather, gorse and pine could produce inland-links conditions every bit as good as the coast. Sunningdale’s most famous round remains Bobby Jones’s qualifying 66 for the 1926 Open — 33 strokes, 33 putts, no hole worse than four — which he called “as near to perfect a round as I could ever play.” The Old has hosted the Walker Cup, the Senior Open and Women’s British Open; the iconic oak tree behind the 18th green is the club’s emblem.

East Brighton Golf Club, founded in 1893, sits high on the chalk downs above Brighton Marina with sweeping views over the English Channel and the South Downs. The current 6,381-yard par-72 layout was designed by James Braid and opened in 1908 after Braid out-tendered Willie Park Jr for the contract. The chalk base drains exceptionally well, keeping the course playable year-round with no winter temporaries, and the routing makes the most of the natural elevation — the 14th plays alongside the boundary of Brighton Racecourse, and several holes still bear the marks of 1940 bombing craters that were retained as features. Past presidents have included Field Marshal Earl Haig and the Duke of Norfolk. With strong open programmes and consistently warm hospitality, East Brighton is one of the most enjoyable downland competitive venues on the south coast.

The Drift Golf Club at East Horsley in the Surrey Hills was created in 1975 by an unusually accomplished design partnership — three-time Open champion Sir Henry Cotton and architect Bob Sandow, who flew with the RAF in the Battle of Britain before becoming director of golf to the Shah of Iran. The 6,447-yard par-73 course was carved out of mature oak woodland next to Effingham Common, with tree-lined fairways, several water features and a particularly strong set of par threes. A phased renovation under European Golf Design (led by Dave Sampson, of Le Golf National fame) began in 2023 to mark the club’s 50th anniversary, adding new holes and water features. Despite a quiet, secluded woodland setting it sits just off the M25, A3 and A24, making it one of the most convenient open-competition venues in Surrey.

Hockley Golf Club, on Twyford Down overlooking Winchester, has one of the more romantic origin stories in English golf: the original nine holes were a silver wedding anniversary gift in 1914 from landowner Horace Trimmer to his wife Bessie, a keen player. Extended to 18 holes during the First World War and remodelled in 1920 by five-time Open Champion James Braid, the 6,420-yard par-71 course sits on free-draining chalk downland within the South Downs National Park, on land now owned by Winchester College. The site is extraordinary: around 40% of the course is covered by Scheduled Ancient Monuments, with a Bronze Age village footprint running across holes 15 to 18, Celtic field banks visible at the 2nd, 4th and 18th, and the remains of a Roman villa with mosaic floor below the 9th green. Add in a stroll through Hockley’s opening valley to the downland plateau above and a quietly impressive set of green complexes, and it’s one of the most rewarding amateur open venues in Hampshire.

The South East has more attractions per square mile than almost any region of England. The Kent coast adds the medieval streets of Sandwich, the white cliffs of Dover, Canterbury Cathedral and the Cinque Ports towns. Sussex has Brighton and the South Downs National Park, Glyndebourne and the Seven Sisters. Surrey’s green-belt countryside — Box Hill, the North Downs, the Surrey Hills AONB — feels rural despite being half an hour from central London. Hampshire brings the cathedral city of Winchester (England’s capital under King Alfred), the New Forest, the Solent coastline and Portsmouth’s naval heritage. Middlesex completes the picture with central London itself, with world-class theatre, restaurants and museums all within easy reach of the heathland belt.

Few golfing regions in the world let you play a links round on the Kent coast in the morning, a heathland classic in the Surrey pines in the afternoon, and finish the evening with dinner in Winchester or central London — and almost nowhere else can claim quite this concentration of championship golf. For amateurs entering open competitions, the South East remains the strongest single region in England.