Stoke Park

Harry Colt and Charles Hugh Alison laid out 27 holes at Stoke Park in 1908, on a 300-acre Buckinghamshire estate whose grounds had been landscaped by Capability Brown a century and a half earlier. It sits five miles from Windsor and four from Pinewood Studios, which is how the par-3 seventh ended up in Goldfinger.

The course is a par 72. It closed in 2021 after the estate changed hands and reopened in 2025 following a long restoration, with a new golf clubhouse near the range and practice ground. Membership is gone: it is now a pay-and-play course.

What it asks of you

Colt and Alison were working on parkland that already had mature trees, water and long sight lines, which is a gift and a constraint at once. What they built uses the existing landscape rather than reshaping it, so the holes are framed by planting that predates the golf.

The seventh is the hole everyone knows, and it is worth saying why it works as golf rather than as a film location: it is a short par 3 over water to a green that gives you nowhere sensible to miss. The camera liked it for the same reason the members feared it.

The restoration has changed the ground under the course more than the routing above it. Reports on the reopened layout describe firmer, faster surfaces than the parkland it used to be.

What players say about it

The reopening was widely covered by the British golf press, and the points below summarise what recurs. These are other people’s opinions, not ours: we have not played the course, and we name and quote no one.

What comes up in its favor

• The Colt and Alison routing survived the restoration, which was the main worry when the estate was sold.
• The setting, a Brown-landscaped park with the mansion at its centre, is unlike anything else within reach of London.
• The practice facilities and the new golf-specific clubhouse are reported as a genuine improvement.
• Pay-and-play access opens a course that was private for over a century.
• The Bond connection draws visitors who then find the golf better than they expected.

What comes up against

• Green fees are high, and the course is priced as a destination rather than a round.
• Ending the membership model was unpopular with those who had one.
• A course that reopened in 2025 is still settling, and conditioning reports vary.
• It is parkland in the Thames Valley, which is not short of parkland.

Getting there and when to go

Stoke Park is at Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, five miles from Windsor and about forty minutes from central London. Heathrow is twenty minutes away.

The course plays year-round, but the ground is firmest from May to September. Tee times are booked directly.

Green fees

Rates are set by the venue and change by season and day of week. See the venue’s own site.

How this page was made

The factual frame comes from public sources: OpenStreetMap for the location, published histories for the 1908 Colt and Alison design and the Capability Brown estate, and British golf press coverage from 2025 and 2026 for the closure, the restoration and the change to pay-and-play. The opinion section summarises public reviews read in September 2026; we report recurring themes rather than individual voices, and we reproduce no quotations. We found no yardage figure we could confirm for the restored layout, so we give none.

We have not played this course, and this page is no substitute for a round. The venue has not paid for this page, has not seen it before publication and has no say over its content. If you know the course and something here is wrong or out of date, write to us and we will correct it.