St Ives

From 1923 to 2010, members at St Ives (Hunts) Golf Club played over a 9-hole parkland course at the outskirts of the historic market town. In 2006, the members decided to move, and the following year they purchased Giffords Farm near Needingworth, a 230-acre property located a mile or so west of St Ives town centre.

Course architect, Cameron Sinclair, was commissioned to lay out the new St Ives course. Sinclair (along with Donald Steel) joined the firm of Cotton, Pennink and Lawrie in the mid-1960s, he then moved to become project architect with Graham 'Swampy' Marsh in 1987 before setting up his own design company in 1990.

In August 2010, Swedish professional Robert Karlsson, who played a five-hole exhibition match to mark the layout’s opening, finally cut the ribbon to herald a new era for St Ives (Hunts) Golf Club.

East Anglia is notoriously flat, but the Giffords Farm property offers some ground movement. The site’s heavy clay soil was sand capped during construction, helping the layout to perform as the architect intended. Fashioned in the style of an inland links, St Ives has sixty-five bunkers with shallow revetted edges to help define the style. Tens of thousands of trees have been planted on the property’s boundaries and some gorse introduced to provide further depth perspective.

Configured conventionally with four par threes, ten par fours and four par fives, St Ives bucked the 1990s new-build trend in the new millennium by avoiding unnecessary length. The course measures a relatively modest 6,758 yards from the tips and is routed in two distinct 9-hole loops where water dominates, especially on the outward nine.

USGA specification greens are carpeted with velvet bentgrass, which provides a dense grass sward that not only tolerates very close cutting, but also requires less water and gives some protection from invasive, thuggish grasses. The result is that St Ives consistently boasts some of the truest putting surfaces in East Anglia.

Big skies are the order of the day here at St Ives Golf Club, where panoramic countryside views combine with the wind to provide a thoroughly engaging golfing experience at one of the most progressive clubs in East Anglia.