Since purchasing the former Dummer site, Basingstoke Golf Club has transformed and created one of the best clubs and courses in the South of England.
The club’s remarkable journey represents a masterclass in strategic club redevelopment, transforming from a constrained site to a state-of-the-art golfing facility that secures its future for decades to come.
A new 162-acre facility represents a significant upgrade, featuring a brand-new clubhouse, redesigned course, and a driving range in development.
The transformation began in 2018 when members voted to sell their original Kempshott Park location and purchase the nearby Dummer Golf Club site.
The move wasn’t just about relocating, but reimagining the club’s entire operational model, with teams merging and an entirely new set-up being established. This included restructuring the board, creating clear vision statements, and developing a more commercial approach to sustainability.
Scott Patience, who appeared alongside General Manager David Green on a recent GCMA Insights podcast, was brought in as a consultant to help manage the many complexities around the integration of two facilities, each with their own teams and members whose expectations did not necessarily align.
“When I was approached the club were going through a difficult period, because even though 85% voted to leave, they were still wedded to the old site,” he said.
“When they came across, you had the Dummer members who loved their club, but the club was in decline and they knew they were going to sell, while the other members wanted to be at their old site and they wanted to recreate Basingstoke and just put it on top of Dummer, which was never going to work.
“The secretary at the time left, no assistant manager, the chairman had left the board at the time, they had no planning, and they had £54 million coming so and they had to deliver the project.”
The sense of uncertainty was shared among staff, as Patience explained: “The Dummer team didn’t know what was happening, so they were naturally nervous. There were two course managers, two bar managers – nobody knew whose role was what.
“It was about bringing the cultures together. You need to understand that every club has different dynamics, and you need to learn to understand that.”
General Manager Green joined in November 2023 when the project was in full flow and has since continued to play a key role in what has been an incredibly successful integration.
Supporting Patience in the work that was already underway, Green understandably needed some time to get to grips with the various obstacles involved, which spanned staffing, logistics, governance and much more besides, but he has relished the challenge.
“We needed to dissolve the current operating company and put it into liquidation as part of our articles, but have a new company set up at the same time, and therefore going through a total change of governance within the golf club,” he explained.
“From starting the process of moving from an operating company to liquidation from the beginning of August to when we liquidated on the 11th of October was was an unbelievable challenge, and something I’d never done before.
“I spent hours with lawyers and accountants and the liquidators to be able to support that. There was an awful lot of work that needed to be done within the operating structure of the golf club to make sure it was ready to do that.
“We had to make sure that all the accounts were up to date, all the various other elements of asset that were going to get transferred, all the asset lists that were going to get transferred to the new company. A lot of it wasn’t very well placed within the operating systems that the club had, so we needed to put a lot of infrastructure in place for the old company which was about to liquidate, to be able to then pass it on to the new company to make sure it was ready to pick it up and run with it fairly quickly from the 12th of October.”
