New Zealand Golf Club

Overview: New Zealand Golf Club is a private heathland course at Woodham Lane in Addlestone, Surrey. The eighteen-hole layout is listed at 6,075 yards and par 68, using sandy ground, heather, pine and birch to create a quiet, strategic round. The course is not built around dramatic elevation or excessive length. Its interest comes from the way tree-lined corridors, small changes in level and carefully shaped greens ask the player to choose a line before the shot is played. Heather and woodland can make a fairway appear narrower than it is, while the best approach angle often depends on placing the drive on a particular side. The intimate setting and firm heathland turf give the course a strong sense of continuity, with the holes moving through the land rather than being imposed on it. New Zealand is a design-led Surrey course whose character lies in restraint, placement and the details around the greens.

History: Hugh Fortescue Locke King commissioned Samuel Mure Fergusson in 1893 to design and supervise a private golf course on the Woodham estate. The New Zealand Golf Club opened on 25 May 1895, taking its name from cottages on the property that had been named decades earlier because of the Locke King family's connections with New Zealand. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Tom Simpson improved the original routing, with Philip MacKenzie Ross assisting with the 1931 redesign. Later restoration work has used historic drawings and aerial photographs to recover Simpson's strategic bunkering and the shape of the original green complexes. The course's present identity is therefore a blend of Fergusson's pioneering forest-course setting and Simpson's more exacting architectural details.

Did You Know? The club's name comes from cottages built at Woodham in the 1850s. Peter John Locke King named the area New Zealand to honour his family's links with the colony, so the name predates the golf club by about forty years.