Royal Liverpool Golf Club

About the club

The original course at Royal Liverpool dates to around 1900, but the present Hoylake layout is for the most part the work of legendary designer Harry S. Colt, who was called in in 1923, apart from some minor renovations, the most recent carried out by Donald Steel in anticipation of the return of the Open to the club in 2006 for the first time in some four decades. Each and every hole on the Hoylake has its special and distinctive charms and challenges, but the heart of the course is the stretch from the eighth through thirteenth holes, which are threaded amid dunes right by the ocean. A round opens, though, with the doglegged, par 4 1st, which, with its confusing boundaries, is perhaps the toughest on the course, though it, like the concluding holes, plays out over fairly level ground. The Hoylake represents the living history of tournament golf in England.