Royal St George's

The Open first left Scotland in 1894, and Sandwich is where it went. John Henry Taylor won that championship. Fifteen Opens have been played here in all. Harry Vardon took the 1899 and 1911 championships, Jack White 1904, Walter Hagen 1922 and 1928, Henry Cotton 1934, Reg Whitcombe 1938, Bobby Locke 1949. Then a gap until 1981 and Bill Rogers, followed by Sandy Lyle in 1985, Greg Norman in 1993, Ben Curtis in 2003, Darren Clarke in 2011 and Collin Morikawa in 2021. A surgeon, Laidlaw Purves, founded the club in 1887; it became Royal in 1902. Ian Fleming was elected captain in 1964 and died of a heart attack the next morning without taking office, having already put the course in Goldfinger as Royal St Marks.

The ground is wild duneland, and Purves routed holes so that many tee shots and approaches were blind or half-blind; later work has taken some of that away, most recently Martin Ebert's changes in 2016. Fourteen Amateur Championships have been decided over this ground. One hole is worth knowing before you arrive: the fourth. It is a par four of 496 yards and it carries the deepest bunker in championship golf. Elsewhere the card runs to 7,204 yards and par 70, with the seventh the longest hole at 573 yards and the sixteenth the shortest at 161. Nothing here is levelled out: humps and hollows can kick a well-struck drive into rough, and seven tee shots are blind with no marker post to aim at.