Wentworth Golf Club

Founded in 1922, Wentworth is one of the older golf estates in the south-east of England, developed in the years after the First World War as part of a wider wave of country club building around London's western fringe. The estate sits in Surrey, on the sandy heathland that runs between Windsor Great Park and the Berkshire border, an area of pine, birch and heather that made it particularly well suited to golf course construction in the early twentieth century, when architects favoured well-drained, naturally undulating ground of this kind. Virginia Water and the surrounding villages grew up alongside the estate through the interwar decades, developing into some of the more sought-after residential addresses in the Home Counties. The area's proximity to both London, some twenty miles to the east, and the M25 and M3 motorway network has helped sustain its appeal over the century since the club's founding. Surrey's heathland belt, of which this is part, differs markedly from the chalk downland further south in the county, its sandy soils and conifer plantations giving the landscape a distinctive, more heavily wooded character.