Golf
A panoramic view of the Phoenix course “ 20
The club has always been known for its forward-thinking nature. The revenues, as with any golf club, are at their best in summer, then these extra sub-lets help keep that stream up during the winter months
‘rejoice in the light’, alongside a phoenix insignia. Both have ties to Croome Court, which is a little over ten miles away on the other side of Worcester. The phrase appears also in the writings on Croome. According to theories on the mystery, the
phrase could be a vestigial family motto and crest. It’s possible that the farmhouse, which is around 600 years old and has been aggressively extended by each consecutive owner, was once a shooting lodge outpost within the sprawling grounds run by this family. The full extent of research is yet to be undertaken, but it may prove more interesting still. But, at this club, that tradition is melded with modernity in a way that somehow isn’t jarring. The clubhouse is a modern, part- wooden clad building, in the style of an IT company’s corporate office. It’s got Swedish- looking furniture, and a lot of glass on the exterior. Surprisingly, it’s the second clubhouse they’ve used in the club’s short history.
This highlights one of the club’s key
features in terms of its revenue stream. The owners run the site, and the area
surrounding the car park works as a multi- business centre like a mall. They rent other buildings out to around a
dozen other businesses, as diversified as a chiropractor, a gym, a therapeutic centre and a hairdressers’ salon, a financial planner, a garden machinery repair workshop and the Worcestershire division of St John’s Ambulance, with some vacant lots remaining to be let. These were made possible by the conversion of the agricultural buildings already available to the owners. It also includes a childcare centre owned and operated by the club, known as ‘Phoenix Childcare’ in the vein of the rest of the club’s image, which caters for up to eighty children per day.
All of this, of course, aids profits. And this is all evidence of the creativity that goes into the running of the club. As Course Manager, Andrew Laing is a driver behind this creativity and works closely with the club’s owners and directors. He said: “The club has always been known
for its forward-thinking nature. The revenues, as with any golf club, are at their best in summer, then these extra sub-lets help keep that stream up during the winter months.”
The club is owned by Martin and Gill
Fernihough, whose son Alec and his wife Jenny run the business on a day-to-day basis, making it a family enterprise. And family was crucial to the foundation of the club too. Alec’s great uncle, Peter Fernihough, bought the land hoping to build a motorway service station attached to a new slip-road to the M5 - the course runs directly alongside the M5, and access to it requires driving under the motorway immediately before turning into the clubhouse drive. The reason why planning permission for
I PC AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2017 Crowds following play during the Trilby Tour
the services was refused is because the area is only accessible Southbound, so anyone using the M5 North wouldn’t have been able to use the facilities. And the Fernihoughs were not the only family involved in the formative days of the
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