Wickham Park Golf Course

Origins

Wickham Park opened in 1991, one of a wave of privately built parkland courses that appeared across southern England in the late 1980s and early 1990s as demand for golf outstripped the supply of older members' clubs. The course was laid out by architect Jon Payne on farmland in the Meon Valley outside the village of Wickham, a few miles north of Fareham. The site's gentle, relatively flat terrain shaped a course that plays shorter than most 18-hole layouts, at a par of 69 over 5,868 yards, but Payne's routing compensates with tighter, tree-lined corridors and small greens rather than length.

Design Philosophy

The design rewards placement over power. Fairways are lined with mature trees and several holes are guarded by ditches, ponds or bunkers positioned to catch shots that miss the safe line rather than to punish short hitters. The par-69 routing includes a run of tightly bunkered short holes, and its compact greens put a premium on distance control with the irons.

The 17th, a 198-yard uphill par 3 to a two-tiered green with out of bounds left and a bunker right, is generally treated as the course's signature hole, while the elevated tee shot on the 12th and the dogleg 2nd are the other holes most often singled out by golfers as the ones that decide a round.

Today

Wickham Park is operated by Crown Golf, a group of courses across southern England and Cornwall, and functions as a semi-private club: it carries a full membership structure alongside general online booking of visitor tee times. In recent years the club has added a Toptracer-tracked driving range alongside its existing chipping and putting practice areas, reflecting a broader shift toward pay-and-play and practice-focused facilities at commercially run UK clubs of its era.