Crews Hill Golf Club

Crews Hill Golf Club sits at the very northern tip of Greater London, on Cattlegate Road at Enfield, surrounded by nurseries and farmland rather than suburb. Crews Hill station is more or less at the gate, on the Hertford Loop into Moorgate, and the M25 is close at junctions 24 and 25 – an unusually easy venue to get to from almost anywhere in north London and southern Hertfordshire.

The club was founded in the early 1910s and leased its land from Trinity College, Cambridge. Harry Vardon surveyed the ground and Harry Colt, then secretary at Sunningdale, designed the course, which was completed in 1922. Colt used what the land gave him with very little earth-moving, and the routing has stayed largely as he left it for more than a century. It is a par 70 of 6,281 yards across 150 acres, originally gorse country and now handsomely lined with oaks.

Charles Whitcombe, three times a Ryder Cup player, was the professional here from 1925 and still holds the course record with a 59. The clubhouse balcony looks back across London.