Mixed feelings for Maidenhead Golf Club members after Mill Ride move confirmed

It’s a bittersweet moment in history for Maidenhead Golf Club as it prepares to move to Mill Ride in Ascot after a winding, years-long saga.

The club must move off its current Maidenhead site, based on land owned by RBWM, to make room for 1,500 houses and flats, which the council voted for in February.

Maidenhead Golf Club (MGC) has known that it must move for many years, and that it would receive about £16million from the council for surrendering its lease early.

It has signed the surrender agreement, meaning it is locked in and must move somewhere else – but has struggled for a very long time to find alternative site.

The club looked at several locations including in Fifield, Cookham and Flackwell Heath. All these plans fell through.

But then Mill Ride Golf Club in Ascot came up for sale unexpectedly; the wife of a jailed Azeri banker was forced to forfeit it.

The club was confident it could get Mill Ride – and has since confirmed that it has signed the purchase agreements.

MGC members will continue to play at Shoppenhangers Road until the end of this year. The Mill Ride and MGC teams will work together on management and oversight.

Both clubs will ‘initially operate in parallel’ and will be no immediate changes in personnel, said club chairman Dave Baker in a letter to members.

The club is looking to improve both the irrigation and drainage on the site, and it is working towards developing a schedule of competitions and events for 2026.

As for whether it will still be called Maidenhead Golf Club, Mr Baker said members can ‘be assured that the name Maidenhead will continue to feature’ in any new name.

“We are now entering a new phase in our history and we hope you will all join us on this journey,” Mr Baker wrote.

While club members are broadly in favour of moving to Mill Ride, there remains considerable ill-feeling about the whole situation.

Long time member, 91-year-old Tony Stevens, said he is still ‘very disappointed’ by the fact that MGC has to move at all.

“I’m going to Mill Ride because there’s no alternative,” he said. “We’re over a barrel.

“[Maidenhead Golf Course] really is a nice spot. To think they're going to put houses there is disgusting really.”

However, Mill Ride is a better choice than the ‘not very nice’ Flackwell Heath course, he believes – so much so, he does not think that members would have agreed to a Flackwell move.

This opinion is shared by fellow MGC member Peter O’Hara.

"There are quite a number of older members who would have found it very difficult to play Flackwell Heath,” he said. “It's quite hilly, whereas Mill Ride is comparatively flat, and it is a better layout.”

The Flackwell deal fell through due to negotiations that would have ‘made it difficult to move there,’ said Peter.  

During this time Mill Ride became available and there is ‘no question’ it is the better course, he said. In fact, it’s a ‘superb’ course – but it is also the ‘only choice’ MCG has.

“Really, when you go through it all, there’s no alternative,” he said.

One upside is that the members of Mill Ride have been ‘excellent’ and appear to be looking forward to MGC members joining them, said Peter.

However, he maintains that the council 'let us down 100 per cent' over the long-running golf club saga.

In July last year, any last hopes to salvage Maidenhead Golf Course from development were dashed when the cabinet member for planning said it was ‘all but impossible’ to get out of the deal signed under the previous administration.

At this meeting, council leader said it was ‘with sadness’ that he had to accept this and allow development to move forward.

But the fact remains that Maidenhead stands to lose something special, says Peter.

“It's more than a golf club," he said. We have a tremendous amount of social events, not just for members, but for others."

There are also drawbacks to Mill Ride, including the distance.

“Unfortunately, it's about 10 miles away from where we are, so not everybody will be going,” said Peter. “They live the wrong side of Maidenhead.

“For those of us that are going to Mill Ride, we are looking forward to it.”