Britain's record-breaking summer drought has left Royal St George's, one of golf's most storied championship venues, virtually unrecognizable, its once-green fairways burned to a barren grey-brown.
New photos published by The Sun show the iconic links course in Sandwich, Kent, stripped of color after weeks of punishing heat and no rain. The damage extends well beyond a single club. Courses across the south of England, from Aldwickbury Park in Harpenden to Richmond golf club in London, look more like parched farmland than manicured sporting grounds.
The south of England just recorded its driest July since 1836, nearly two centuries of rainfall data. Temperatures in Sandwich climbed as high as 35 degrees Celsius in recent weeks, and the combination of extreme heat and bone-dry conditions has overwhelmed groundskeepers' ability to keep anything but greens and tees alive.
Royal St George's is no ordinary course. It has hosted the Open Championship fifteen times, the most of any English venue and the fourth most overall. In 1894, it became the first course outside Scotland selected for the Open. American Collin Morikawa won the most recent edition there in 2021.
That pedigree makes the current images all the more striking. Photos from The Times show fairways that once tested the world's best golfers reduced to grey, lifeless stretches. Club staff have focused their limited water on greens and tees, the surfaces players need most, but the fairways tell the real story of how severe this drought has become.
Some clubs face hosepipe limitations that restrict how much water they can put on their courses. The restrictions carve out exceptions for tees and greens but leave fairways to fend for themselves. The source of those limitations, whether a regional water authority or local utility, is not specified in available reporting.
Royal St George's is not suffering alone. At Aldwickbury Park in Harpenden, the color has been virtually sucked out of the course and replaced with dull grey-brown hues. Richmond golf club in London is mottled with grey patches that continue spreading across its fairways.
The pattern across these clubs paints a consistent picture: groundskeepers doing everything they can with limited water, and still losing ground to a drought that has no modern precedent in the region's records.
Forecasters expect intermittent rain across the south of England over the coming two weeks, which could begin to break the dry spell. But weeks of record heat and zero rainfall have already taken a visible toll that will not reverse overnight.
Golf courses depend on consistent moisture to maintain playing surfaces. When that moisture disappears for an entire record-setting month, the result is exactly what these photos show, courses that look abandoned rather than championship-ready.
Nature does not negotiate with tradition. A venue that has hosted the Open since Queen Victoria's reign looks the same as every other patch of scorched English ground right now, and no amount of history changes what happens when the rain stops.
