Golf
Moor Park Golf Club
Parkland poetry...
The West Course 18th in front of the glorious Moor Park Mansion
It’s easy to see how waxing lyrical about the splendour of Moor Park is so very right. Neville Johnson went to this Hertfordshire golf club, that has a mansion for its 19th hole, to find out about its history and talk to Stuart Bertram, the man who looks after the two excellent courses there
D 22 I PC OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2015
The 15th on the High Course, a parkland golf environment hard to beat
id ever golf club have a nineteenth hole so sumptuous as this? Did ever golf club have so fine a hall? In 1973 these were the words of the then Poet
Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, about what has to be one of the most impressive golf clubhouses in the world, the 18th century mansion at the Moor Park Club near Rickmansworth. It was featured in the acclaimed documentary Metroland, made for BBC Television by the great man of words, celebrating the development of suburban life across the outer extremes of north-west London. The cameras also recorded him missing a tee shot, an hilarious lasting reminder that he was no golfer. The Grade 1 listed Paladian house was initially built for the 1st Duke of Monmouth
in 1678, but its appearance today is owed to fortune maker owner Benjamin Styles, who had it remodeled in the 1720s. In more recent times, it played a part in the Second World War, when it was requisitioned as headquarters for the planning of the ultimately disastrous Arnhem airborne landings in September 1944. As well as the beautifully preserved grand interior, this is something that attracts many a visitor to Moor Park.
The mansion’s surroundings owe much to
Capability Brown landscaping in the 1750s. In mid-Victorian times, the owner at the time, the first Lord Ebury, built a golf course for personal use, and this was improved by his son, the second Lord Ebury, in 1893. When the whole estate was sold to Lord Leverhulme in 1920, things changed. Fringe
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