Littlehampton Golf Club enlarges bunkers

By Alistair June 11, 2022 08:25

Big changes are afoot at Littlehampton Golf Club in West Sussex with a significant redevelopment of the golf course underway, to include new practice facilities, thousands of tonnes of spoil moved in to create dramatic mounding between holes, and a complete remodelling of fairway bunkers, working in partnership with Durabunker.

Course manager, Michael Mead commented: “These are exciting times and we wanted to incorporate Durabunker into the project, having successfully worked with them over the past five years, developing a fantastic working relationship. We asked Durabunker owner, Rhydian Lewis, to visit the site to share some thoughts regarding our current bunkers. We were immediately inspired to think radically about the fairway bunkers in particular.”

Before

Lewis added: “Given the size of the new mounding created between holes, around 50 feet in most places, we felt that the existing small pot bunkers were being swallowed up by the sheer scale of the changes, they looked like pin pricks on the landscape and, for us, just weren’t proportionate in size to the new topography.

“We discussed an entirely different fairway bunker design, urging Michael to be bold and to work with us to create sprawling, irregular, waste-type bunkers, with chunky revetment in specific areas and almost nothing showing in other areas.

“We looked at the form of some of the natural sand dunes around the course and the idea was to replicate that natural look, planting indigenous marram grass around the surrounds of the bunkers, and pushing the bunkers up into the lower part of the mounding so that they merged far more seamlessly into the new surrounds.”

After

Durabunker led the design work, supplied its synthetic bunker edging material and its own fabric liner, Duraliner, for the project, with Michael and team on construction.

Michael concluded: “I’m so pleased we went with Durabunker’s bold design, the aesthetics are sensational, the edges are rock solid and the liner has held sand on faces even during heavy rains. The results are simply stunning in every sense.”