The Maidenhead Golf Club

The Maidenhead Golf Club no longer plays at Maidenhead. Founded in 1896, it spent 129 years on a parkland course off Shoppenhangers Road, a short walk south of Maidenhead railway station, on land that ended up belonging to the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. The council has taken the land back for housing: the club gave up its lease in return for £15.95 million, members played their last round at Shoppenhangers Road on 31 December 2025, and since January 2026 the club has played at Mill Ride, the former Mill Ride Golf Club near Ascot, which it bought in 2025. The old course is closed for good. The land is earmarked for Elizabeth Quarter, a scheme of up to 1,500 homes with schools and a local centre, for which the developer has outline planning permission and a building timetable running from 2027 to 2040. The club’s website is maidenheadgolf.co.uk.

This page records what happened to the old ground and describes where you can play under the Maidenhead name today: a Donald Steel layout of 1990, 6,821 yards and par 72 from the white tees on the club’s scorecard.

Which course is this?

OpenStreetMap still draws the old ground as Maidenhead Golf Course and links it to the Wikidata item Q6735432 and the English Wikipedia article on Maidenhead Golf Club. The map on this page shows Mill Ride, where the club now plays, not the former course at Maidenhead. OpenStreetMap’s address lookup places the middle of the old course near Clifton Close in Bray Wick, Maidenhead; the club’s long-standing postal address was Shoppenhangers Road, SL6 2PZ, the address still carried by several golf directories.

The club today calls itself The Maidenhead Golf Club, with the article, on every page of its website, and gives its address as Mill Ride, Ascot, Berkshire, SL5 8LT. When the purchase was announced in 2025 the club said its name going forward had yet to be confirmed, and its chairman told members that the name Maidenhead would feature in it whatever happened; the result is the name you see in the title. Wikipedia now places the club in North Ascot. Any directory still listing a par 70 course at Shoppenhangers Road is out of date.

129 years at Shoppenhangers Road

The club’s own history pages, a series of short illustrated chapters written for its 125th anniversary in 2021, tell the early story. The club was formed in 1896 by a group that included senior officers of the Brigade of Guards and several naval officers, among them a son of the Earl of Orkney, together with two local men, T. J. Wootton and Dr G. E. Moore. Moore’s friendship with W. H. Grenfell, Mayor of Maidenhead in 1895 and 1896 and owner of more than 10,000 acres around the town, got the project going. Grenfell leased the club part of his land near the station, became its first president and gave the Grenfell Cup, which the club says is still played for every year. He was later made Lord Desborough.

According to the club, the course opened for play on 12 December 1896, with a champagne luncheon in a new clubhouse; the Maidenhead Advertiser’s report of the opening, reproduced by the history site Golf’s Missing Links, is dated 16 December 1896. The land was part of the farm of the old Shoppenhangers Manor, and the club’s account of the early years is a story of farm grass turned slowly into fairways. The founders hired the corporation’s steam roller for a pound to flatten the bumps, sheep grazed the course for years, and horses pulled the mowers until 1924.

The railway mattered from the start: in 1897, the club records, the Great Western Railway offered members cheap day returns from Paddington, with the first tee three minutes’ walk from the station.

The design of the old course is credited mainly to the club’s first professional, Alex Simpson, from Forfar, and to J. H. Taylor. The club records that Taylor, then at the height of a career in which he won the Open five times, was consulted in 1908 and advised lengthening the course by 700 yards and building seventeen new bunkers; Golf’s Missing Links dates his visit to February 1908. Later generations went the other way: a bunkers sub-committee had 26 bunkers removed by bulldozer in 1947, and in the 1950s bunkers in the rough were flattened. The timber clubhouse of 1896 was altered in 1904 and 1911 and rebuilt in brick in 1995, and that 1995 building is the one now at the centre of a dispute over its future.

Why the course closed

The club never owned the course. By the time of the redevelopment the freehold belonged to the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, and the club held a lease which, according to the Maidenhead Advertiser, was due to run until 2039. The borough’s local plan earmarked the land for housing, and the council entered into a joint venture with the developer CALA Homes, through its wholly owned company RBWM Property Company, to build on it.

The sequence, as reported by the council, Wikipedia and the local press, runs as follows. Wikipedia, citing a council press release, says the club agreed with the council in July 2016 to end its lease early. In September 2021 the members voted to accept the council’s offer of £15.95 million for surrendering the lease. CALA submitted an outline planning application for the scheme, called Elizabeth Quarter, in January 2024. On 30 August 2024 the club told its members that the council had paid the full surrender value; from then on it occupied the course under a licence that allowed CALA access to the site but guaranteed members unrestricted play on all 18 holes until 31 December 2025. The club said it had been pushed to move, and the campaign group Maidenhead Great Park opposed the scheme throughout.

Finding a new home took years. According to the Advertiser, the club looked at sites in Fifield, Cookham and Flackwell Heath, including a possible move to Winter Hill in Cookham and a merger with Flackwell Heath Golf Club; all of them fell through. Then Mill Ride came up for sale. It had been owned by Zamira Hajiyeva, wife of the jailed former chairman of the International Bank of Azerbaijan, and was given up following a National Crime Agency investigation that produced the UK’s first unexplained wealth order; a trustee appointed by the High Court put it on the market at a guide price of £4.25 million, according to Bracknell News. The Maidenhead club lodged an interest in August 2024, said in May 2025 that it was optimistic, and signed the purchase agreements in July 2025.

The last day of golf at Shoppenhangers Road was 31 December 2025. Top 100 Golf Courses records a final round on that day, and the Henley Standard reported that the club vacated the site on New Year’s Eve. In November 2025 the chairman, Dave Baker, told the Advertiser that the club had faced the real prospect of closing for good, and spoke of a huge sense of nostalgia after almost 130 years at the site.

What happens to the site now

The council’s committee backed CALA’s outline application for up to 1,500 homes at a special meeting in February 2025, a vote the developer hailed at the time as its outline planning permission. The council’s own page dates the outline permission to December 2025, which would fit a formal decision once the legal agreement was signed; we have not seen the decision notice. A 2022 version of the scheme proposed around 2,000 homes.

The plan includes 30 per cent affordable housing according to the council, a primary and a secondary school, healthcare facilities, shops and a central green spine, and it keeps the ancient woodland of Rushington Copse inside the site. A timetable submitted on behalf of CALA in February 2026 and reported by the Henley Standard puts building work between 2027 and 2040: around 130 homes in the south of the former course from 2027 to 2030, the bulk between 2030 and 2035, and the northern part between 2035 and 2040.

The clubhouse is the latest flashpoint. In decisions taken in May and July 2026 but published only in September, the council resolved to demolish the empty clubhouse and outbuildings at a cost of about £70,000, arguing that this was needed to progress the redevelopment and would remove liabilities. More than 550 people signed a petition asking it to keep the building for community use until construction reaches it, and Maidenhead Community Centre has expressed interest in running it. On 2 October 2026 the Advertiser reported that the demolition, which had been due to start the following week, had been paused because of concerns raised and what the council called errors in the planning process, so that the appropriate approvals could be obtained. The course and clubhouse have been listed as assets of community value. At the time of writing we know of no further decision.

In short: the old course cannot be played, and will not be again.

The old course, as it was

We could not find a scorecard for the Shoppenhangers Road course on the club’s website, which now describes only Mill Ride, so the figures below come from golf directories and do not agree with each other. GolfPass and 1golf.eu give a par 70 of 6,314 yards from the white tees, with a course rating of 70.5 and a slope of 125, and 6,006 yards from the yellow tees, rating 68.9 and slope 121, with a par 72 from the red tees. GolfMagic, 18Birdies and Golfify give 6,338 yards, and other listings range up to 6,364. Top 100 Golf Courses describes the course as measuring more than 6,300 yards across 134 acres of mature parkland, while other descriptions speak of 150 acres of mature woodland. We have kept these figures out of the data panel on this page because they describe a course that no longer exists.

The descriptions we read agree on its character: a mature, tree-lined parkland course, fairly flat and an easy walk, where accuracy counted for more than length. GolfMagic’s review, written by a former junior member, singled out small greens that fall away on most sides and called the approach shots perhaps the toughest in the county. Top 100 Golf Courses ranked it 13th in Berkshire in 2015.

Where the club plays now: Mill Ride

Mill Ride lies on the north side of Ascot, off the A329 between Ascot and Bracknell, in a part of Berkshire thick with famous golf: Royal Ascot, Swinley Forest and Sunningdale are all nearby. Bracknell News places it at Winkfield Row and describes a 62.5-hectare site; the club speaks of 170 acres. The course was designed by Donald Steel and opened in 1990, and was run until 2025 as Mill Ride Golf Club, sometimes Mill Ride Golf and Country Club.

The club describes it as perfectly manicured, cross-cut fairways among lakes, mounds and hollows, a parkland course with an inland links feel at the start and the finish. On the old Mill Ride listing, Top 100 Golf Courses calls it one of the best new courses in prosperous Berkshire, with fairways weaving past lakes, hillocks and hollows. Since taking over, the club has invested in the course and clubhouse, with irrigation and drainage among its priorities; in late October 2026 its course status page reported irrigation work closing the 13th hole and the driving range.

What it asks of you

The club publishes its scorecard online. It carries no ratings or slopes and no date, and gives four sets of tees:

• White tees: 6,821 yards, par 72.
• Yellow tees: 6,444 yards, par 72.
• Blue tees: 6,003 yards, par 72 for men.
• Red tees (women): 5,717 yards, par 73; the blue tees are also listed for women at 6,003 yards, par 73.

The white card goes out in 3,340 yards and par 36 and comes home in 3,481 and par 36. There are two par 5s on each nine, the 1st, 5th, 10th and 18th, the longest being the 10th at 549 yards, and four par 3s: the 3rd at 202 yards, the 8th at 158, the 11th at 167 and the 15th at 193. For women the 17th becomes a par 5 of 413 yards from the red tees, which accounts for the extra stroke. Stroke index 1 for both men and women is the 14th, a par 4 of 404 yards with out of bounds all down the right.

Water is the theme. The club’s hole-by-hole guide mentions it on the 2nd, where a lake runs down the left and longer hitters can start their drive over its edge, on the 4th, the 5th, where water guards the left of the green as well as the fairway, the 10th, where a pond sits short of an uphill green, the 11th and the 17th, where water runs along much of the left. Out of bounds threatens the right of the 5th and the 14th.

The 11th is the hole the club calls its signature: a par 3 of 167 yards from the whites, 162 from the yellows and 135 from the reds, played across water to a shallow green, where the guide warns of a potential card-wrecker and suggests shorter hitters play down the left towards the bunker. The 15th plays to an elevated, well-bunkered green sloping from left to right.

The guide leaves room for strategy: the 1st and 5th are reachable par 5s, the 7th a drivable par 4, and the 18th, at 540 yards, finishes with penalty areas on the approach and a green that can play three or four clubs differently depending on the pin. Geese are part of the setting: the local rules give a free choice of relief from their droppings.

What golfers say

Most opinion about Mill Ride predates the Maidenhead club’s arrival, and opinion about the old course concerns a closed course. For Mill Ride we read search summaries of reviews on GolfPass, Golfshake (about 4.1 out of 5 from more than 170 reviews) and The Social Golfer (4.4 from 8 reviews), and Top 100 Golf Courses’ editorial and overall rating of 3.5. For the old Maidenhead course we read GolfMagic’s review and summaries of Golfshake (4.3 from 48 reviews) and Top 100 Golf Courses (3.5). The points below summarise what recurs. They are other people’s opinions, not ours; nobody from Panxis has played either course, and we name and quote no one.

What comes up in its favour

• At Mill Ride, the greens: several reviewers describe them as fast, consistent and well kept, and some praise the fairways to match.
• The variety and challenge of Mill Ride, with water a key part of the test; Top 100 Golf Courses writes that the holes are so varied there is no chance of becoming bored.
• Value for money and friendly staff, mentioned by visitors to Mill Ride.
• At the old Maidenhead course, the mature trees, the gentle walk and the demanding approaches to small, sloping greens.
• Maidenhead members quoted in the local press see Mill Ride as a better, flatter course than the alternatives considered.

What comes up against

• Drainage at Mill Ride: several reviewers report wet, muddy ground after rain, and others fairways baked hard in dry spells, though some note that drainage work has improved matters. The club itself lists drainage and irrigation among its priorities.
• Greens after maintenance, described as sandy or hollow-tined by some visitors.
• Water: one reviewer wanted fewer water hazards and more pruning of trees, where others see the water as the course’s main attraction.
• For many Maidenhead members, the move itself: local press reports describe real ill-feeling about losing a course they had played for generations.

Most of these reviews predate the change of ownership.

Playing as a visitor

The club says it welcomes visitors, and asks them to book a tee time through the professional’s shop by telephone or by email at proshop@maidenheadgolf.co.uk; the online booking system on its site requires a login. The club professional is Steve Geary, in post at Maidenhead since 1994.

The dress code asks for collared or turtle-neck golf shirts tucked in, tailored shorts with socks, no jeans on the course and golf shoes, preferably soft spikes; trainers are allowed on the practice area. The clubhouse is smart casual. The clubhouse has a restaurant and bar and a terrace overlooking the 18th green, and there are changing rooms with lockers. Practice facilities include a driving range, a short game area with practice bunkers, swing nets and a putting area by the 1st tee.

Getting there and when to go

The club’s directions put it about 15 minutes from junction 3 of the M3 and about the same from junction 6 of the M4, and 40 minutes from London. The club warns that its Forest Road entrance shuts at dusk, after which the Fernbank Road entrance, off the A329, should be used. The postcode for satellite navigation is SL5 8LT.

The club’s main telephone number is 01344 891494 and its general email address manager@maidenheadgolf.co.uk. Its website also lists older 01628 numbers carried over from Maidenhead, which Top 100 Golf Courses still shows; if in doubt, use the main line.

The club publishes no seasonal restrictions on visitors, but it posts a daily course status. Given what reviewers say about drainage, it is worth checking that page in winter or after heavy rain.

Green fees

The club sets weekday and weekend rates and a fourball rate, with society packages: see the club’s website for current prices.

How this page was made

The factual frame comes from public sources: OpenStreetMap, Wikidata and Wikipedia for the former course and the move; the club’s website for its name, address, history chapters, scorecard, hole guide, local rules, facilities, dress code and visitor information; the Maidenhead Advertiser (September 2024, July 2025, November 2025, October 2026), Bracknell News and the Henley Standard (February 2026) for the lease, the purchase of Mill Ride, the last day and the future of the site; the council’s project page, through search summaries; Golf’s Missing Links for the 1896 press reports; GolfPass, 1golf.eu, GolfMagic, 18Birdies and Golfify for figures of the old course; and GolfMagic, Golfshake, GolfPass, The Social Golfer and Top 100 Golf Courses for both courses and the opinions summarised above.

Where sources disagree, we say so. The outline planning permission is dated February 2025 by the developer and the Henley Standard, and December 2025 by the council’s own page. Golf’s Missing Links says the club and course closed in January 2026 and that the club was to merge with Flackwell Heath, a plan that the Advertiser reports fell through; the club, Top 100 Golf Courses and the Henley Standard put the last day on 31 December 2025. The club dates the opening of the old course to 12 December 1896, while Top 100 Golf Courses wrote in 2015 that an exhibition match by J. H. Taylor and James Braid marked the official opening two years after the club was formed. The old course’s length varies between 6,314 and 6,364 yards depending on the directory. At Mill Ride, the chairman’s welcome and the scorecard give 6,821 yards from the championship tees, the membership page 6,861; Top 100 Golf Courses calls the 17th a 437-yard par 4, while the card gives 441 from the white tees and 435 from the yellow. Mill Ride is placed in Ascot by the club, in North Ascot by Wikipedia and at Winkfield Row by Bracknell News, and its area is 62.5 hectares for Bracknell News and 170 acres for the club. Wikipedia describes the old lease as a 24-year lease, while the Advertiser says it was due to expire in 2039. We have not resolved these differences ourselves.

Golfshake’s course pages, the council’s project page and its decision notices could not be read in full, and we have relied on search summaries for them only where we say so, never for a course figure. We found no published course rating or slope for Mill Ride under its new owners, no scorecard on the club’s site for the old course and no confirmed architect for the old layout beyond the club’s account of Alex Simpson and J. H. Taylor. Green fee amounts are deliberately left out.

The opinion section summarises reviews and descriptions read in October 2026. We report recurring themes rather than individual voices, and we reproduce no quotations from reviewers. Nobody from Panxis has played or visited either course, and this page is no substitute for a round.

The club has not paid for this page, has not seen it before publication and has no say over its content. This page contains no commercial link and earns us no commission. If you know the club and something here is wrong or out of date, write to us and we will correct it.

Other courses nearby

Closest to this one in our British directory:

• Royal Ascot Golf Club — 1 mi
• Sand Martins Golf Club — 7 mi
• Foxhills Golf Club — 7 mi
• Queenwood Golf Club — 8 mi