Welwyn Garden City Golf Club Ltd.

WGC GC suffers from it's limited length in the modern game and is a little straight. Grounds staff do a good job managing this with mowing patterns against the direction of play, narrowing fairways and keeping slick greens. However, the greens can also run inconsistently according to where you are on the course. I suspect, with ever advancing technology, this will become an increasingly redundant course for younger longer players. You can only dine out on it being Nick Faldo's first course for so long! Membership is heavily weighted to the older generation and as such rounds can be very slow at peak periods. Members / visitors also seem to be unaware of course etiquette with pitch marks and stray balls being a real issue! Unfortunately, the problems are further exacerbated by some poor choices for committee members who seem to be interested in personal gains rather than the improvement of the club. I shall be moving on this year.

Played here recently for the first time in a golf day for about 30/40 people. Not the easiest the place to find, I’m glad I had sat-nav, nice clubhouse, can’t comment on the members as most had left by the time we were ready to go out. Nice outlook over the putting green to the attractive looking fairways, several players found the greens quite slow, and several bunkers were rather lacking in sand. I found the first 5/6 holes rather boring, just up and down parallel with the previous hole, on each fairway there is a quite deep valley that one plays down and then up the other side. After those holes the course did improve, but it did suffer from a favourite moan of mine, and that is the lack of good signage from green to the next tee. The 150yard markers were also quite well hidden, and only on one side of the fairway only. The changing room was excellent, with full air conditioning, a real bonus with the mini heat wave on the day we played, in general the clubhouse was very nice and the meal good, there appeared to be a good level of staffing, often the sign of a fairly affluent club, but overall I wouldn’t put in my top 20.

Have played at Welwyn Garden City a few times and have to say it is a real gem. The course is quite undulating in places and has some very quick greens. The course is famed as the home course of Sir Nick Faldo and given the different shots which are required to get round it, it's easy to see why he turned out ok! There are lots of good courses in Hertfordshire but think this is one of my favourites. Food and clubhouse were excellent and we were made to feel very welcome as visitors, there is a nice veranda overlooking the 18th green which is nice with a pint!