Five years ago, during the early months of the pandemic lockdown, I taught myself how to use the open-source mapping software QGIS, applying my new-found skills to locating and measuring the golf courses which pepper London’s suburbs. I’d suspected that the area of London occupied by golf was large, but I hadn’t anticipated it being as much as a mid-sized borough.
What I wanted to know was: given the huge area of land dedicated to this single use, how many homes might be built if we were to allocate some of this space for development.
In May this year, the Mayor of London published his long-awaited outline proposals for how the city might evolve over the coming years. “Towards a New London Plan” is his consultation on the the future of the London Plan, the spatial policy plan for London.
In my article I’d argued that, on the whole, golf courses fail to meet the criteria for Metropolitan Open Land; a specific planning designation within the London Plan, designed to protect open space from development, effectively benefiting from the same protections as green belt. A key criterium for MOL is that the open space in question must “serve either the whole or significant parts of London”. While it’s the case that some courses have public paths within them, woe betide anyone who fancies a Saturday afternoon picnic on the fairway of the ninth. As for biodiversity: well, golf courses are largely monocultural with sterile soil. Research from abroad has even suggested that living close to a golf course can give you Parkinson’s Disease.
It was a welcome surprise to see the Towards a New London Plan agreeing with my analysis. The chapter covering MOL included the following text (my emphasis):
2.11 Metropolitan Open Land
The Mayor will continue to give protection to MOL given its vital role for Londoners and providing a liveable city as London grows. However, some areas of MOL, such as certain golf courses are not accessible to the wider public and have limited biodiversity value. This undermines the purpose of the designation. These areas could be assessed to understand whether they should be released from MOL. They may be able to help to meet London’s housing and accessible open space provision (for example opening up strategic new open spaces accessible to Londoners alongside new homes). At the same time, they could improve biodiversity through landscape-led redevelopment. Clearly there are key issues to explore. For example, could golf courses with Sites of Importance for Nature Conservation (SINC) designations be released (with compensatory biodiversity uplift), and if so, in what circumstances.
Towards a New London Plan, Mayor of London, May 2025
Later in the document, the following paragraph expands on this point, suggesting that some courses could be released for genuine public benefit.
Given the challenging housing target, there may be some very specific circumstances where certain MOL, such as golf courses, could be considered for release for housing. These are often not publicly accessible and offer limited biodiversity value. They could also provide new accessible open spaces and parks alongside housing and other development.
Towards a New London Plan, Mayor of London, May 2025
In fact, since I first conducted my research, Ealing Council did exactly this, having converted Perivale Golf Course into Pear Tree Park.
40 of 93 of London’s golf courses fall within the designation of Metropolitan Open Land, totalling 1,578 hectares. In simple terms, that’s a little larger than the borough of Islington, which has a population of nearly 250,000 people.
Building at an approximate gross density of 50dph (an average for London, equivalent to compact Victorian terraced streets), building on all of the city’s MOL golf courses would yield some 79,000 homes. I don’t think London’s golfers would thank us for that. Besides which, many of the city’s courses are not in easy reach of public transport or high streets – two things new housing will likely need access to. So if we exclude those bits of the courses that are less convenient to get to, we arrive at around 625ha of land. That’s still 31,150 homes – not to be sniffed at, but it’s still only a third of London’s annual target. The graph below shows the accessible areas of those golf courses protected by Metropolitan Open Land, and within 800m of a station or high street (a useful policy definition set out in H2 of the London Plan).
Nevertheless, this is a number of homes worth having. Given that the total area of golf courses in London is well over four thousand hectares, losing just 17% of this for housing doesn’t seem too much of an ask.
The proposed changes to the London Plan are heading in the right direction.