filed for Evening News, 18 December 1990
Golf, as I think the American wit W C Fields once observed, is a good walk spoiled. How heartily I agree!
A childhood of walking the dog across an English common dodging golf balls propelled at me by large men in loud jumpers shouting “four” was enough to prejudice me forever against the great Scottish game. I can remember encouraging the dog to tear up the green.
Even today I cannot walk across Bruntsfield Links without feeling a little guilty and instinctively inclining to duck. I cannot watch the game on the television without cursing its infinite tedium.
In the last couple of years, it seems, golf has taken on a new role - helping developers disguise the truth. In dozens of proposed developments around the country, golf courses are now being included as part of the package to try and ‘green’ otherwise damaging schemes.
Developers appear to think that if they wrap up their multi-million pound hotels, leisure centres and housing estates with a golf course or two, they can claim to be environmentally friendly. It is what some planners refer to as ‘planning gain’.
According to a survey conducted recently by the Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland, there are currently 45 new golf courses planned for 39 sites associated with proposals for hotels, houses, leisure centres, holiday chalets and the like. The Association says that there has been an “alarming increase” in the number of houses proposed for rural areas.
“If all these applications are allowed to go through without any form of co-ordination or regulation, the rural areas concerned could rapidly become urbanised through the back door”, it argues. It headlines news of its study ‘The Golf Course as Trojan Horse’.
In Lothian it lists two schemes where golf courses come with other developments attached. One is at Dalmahoy House near Ratho and the other is at Archerfield, near Dirleton, in East Lothian. It is Archerfield with which I am concerned.
This scheme was first publicly announced by the landowner, the Duke of Hamilton, in July 1988. He sold 502 acres of his Archerfield estate to a company called Parkdale Holdings for a cool £1.8 million. According to experts, this is about twice the value of the land.
The Duke, who happens to be Scotland’s premier duke and live in Haddington, stands to gain perhaps another £2 million or so if planning permission is eventually given. He is going to do all right.
The duke’s brother is the Scottish Office environment minister, Lord James Douglas-Hamilton MP, who used to have a shareholding in Hamilton and Kinneil Estates. This will create a delicate problem when - as seems likely - the issue comes to be considered by the Scottish Office. The good Lord James will presumably have to avoid taking part in the process.
The nature of the development had changed since it was first announced - as has the company that is promoting it. Last year Parkdale Holdings were bought out by Pavilion Leisure, which has not itself being doing too well lately. Its shares have dropped from over 200p in 1988 to 10p last month.
The current plan is to build a country club, a 150-bedroom hotel, 150 holiday apartments, 350 houses and, inevitably, two golf courses. The scheme is estimated to cost about £90 million. It will create a community three times larger than neighbouring Dirleton.
Aspects of it are worthwhile. Archerfield House, a grade A listed building designed by Robert Adam, has been standing empty for 25 years. It is a ruin that needs rescuing: Pavilion Leisure’s plans would at least achieve that by turning it into the hotel.
But the housing - aimed at the luxury £160,000-£450,000 market - is wholly unnecessary and wholly inappropriate. It is contrary to East Lothian’s structure plan, it would damage an adjacent nature conservation area and it would change the nature of the whole coastline.
That is why East Lothian District Council were wrong to approve it. And why, in the new year, Lothian Regional Council should call it in, review it and reject it.