Royal Birkdale Golf Club in the town of Southport, England
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RoyalBirkdale is one of the clubs in the Open Championship rotation. The club has hosted The Open eight times since 1954 and Royal Birkdale is host to the 2008 Open Golf Championship. Royal Birkdale has also hosted the Ryder Cup, the Walker Cup, and the Curtis Cup.
Previous winners of the Open at Royal Birkdale are Mark O'Meara, Ian Baker-Finch, Tom Watson, Johnny Miller, Lee Trevino, Arnold Palmer and Peter Thomson (on two separate occasions).
The Southport area boasts the world's greatest concentration of top golf courses. The Open Championship is the world’s oldest, biggest and most sought-after golf prize.
The ‘Royal’ Golf Courses of England’s Golf Coast Royal Birkdale Golf Club is only one of a whole string of first-class golf courses within 20 mile of Southport, three of which regularly host Open Championships. These are Royal Birkdale, Royal Lytham and St Anne’s, and Royal Liverpool.
In fact, there are 160 golf courses within an hour’s drive of Southport. Many of these other courses are used for the qualifying rounds of the Open Championship whenever it visits the region.
Centred on the Birkdale Village area of Southport, this small region contains 3 of the top 20 golf courses, and 7 of the top 36 golf courses in the UK.
In world terms, it has 3 of the world’s top 75 golf courses. Not even the East coast of Scotland around St Andrews, the home of golf, can boast such a concentration of the world’s best golf courses.
These courses are a mixture of links courses and grass courses. The three golf courses to have hosted the Open Championship in recent years (Royal Birkdale, Royal Lytham and St Anne’s, and Royal Liverpool) are, of course, links courses, as the rules lay down that the championship must be played within sight and sound of the sea.
What To Do After the Golf
Visitors to the Open Championship are not restricted to the golf. Just 25 minutes down the road, Liverpool is hosting the European City of Culture in 2008, the rejuvenated Manchester is but a short drive or railway journey away, and a clear day allows for views from Southport of the mountains of both North Wales and the Lake District, each a 90-minute drive away.
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Southport is a very well-preserved Edwardian seaside town at
the centre of what is known as ‘England’s Golf Coast’.