Shipley

The club was originally established as Shipley and Saltaire Golf Club in 1896, when a founders meeting at the Manor House in Shipley fixed subscriptions at 1 guinea for gentlemen and 10 shillings and sixpence for ladies. The club’s course opened the following year, on 6 March 1897, with holes laid out on fields leased from farmers at Moorhead

The Yorkshire Post then reported on 29 October 1919 that Alister MacKenzie had approved a proposed site for a new course at Beckfoot Farms outside Bingley which the club had purchased at public auction the previous day. A Special General Meeting two weeks later appointed MacKenzie as the person to lay out the course for a fee of £200.

On 20 June 1921, the course for the renamed Shipley Golf Club was officially opened. The clubhouse was unveiled the following year and this was marked with an exhibition match involving James Braid, Harry Vardon and club professional Harry Loveridge, who went on to complete forty-nine years of service with the club.

Bounded on three sides by Harden Beck, with dense woodland to the south of the property, the course today is largely as quiet and peaceful as the day MacKenzie completed his design more than a century ago. Apart from the order in which the holes are played, Shipley in the modern era is the Shipley that golfers enjoyed at the start of the 1920s.

The course measures 6,220 yards from the back tees, playing to a par of 71, out in 37 then back in 34. There are six short holes on the card, three on each nine, with back-to-back par fives at the 4th and 5th and back-to-back par threes at the 7th and 8th . The 190-yard 7th is the “signature” hole, playing downhill to a two-tiered green next to the beck.