A small borough with an outsized golfing pedigree
Redbridge is not a large golfing borough. Four clubs cover the towns of Chigwell, Ilford, Wanstead and Woodford Green, and the golf here sits on the fringe of London where the city gives way to Essex woodland and green belt. What the numbers lack in scale, the history makes up for. Two of the county's courses were laid out by designers whose names carry real weight in English golf, and the mix of parkland and forest-edge courses gives club golfers a decent reason to cross the borough rather than stick to one club.
Hainault Forest and the J.H. Taylor connection
Hainault Forest Golf Club in Chigwell is the standout. Set in Essex countryside close to Hainault Forest Country Park, it has two 18-hole parkland courses, both designed by five-time Open Champion J.H. Taylor. The Upper Course dates from 1908 and the Lower from 1923, and the club itself was founded in 1912. What makes the Lower Course particularly interesting is its status in Essex amateur golf: it hosted the final of the 2003 Essex Amateur Championships, becoming the first pay-and-play course ever to do so. For a course open to the public rather than restricted to members, that's a genuine mark of quality, and it's worth remembering when weighing up where to book a round.
A short distance away in Wanstead, Wgc London offers a different flavour of parkland golf. It's an 18-hole course founded in 1893, with well-bunkered greens and a lake hazard that catches the unwary. The layout has just one par-5 but several par-3s, which makes for a round that rewards accurate iron play more than length off the tee.
Woodford's forest nine and Ilford's local club
Woodford Golf Club, in Woodford Green, is the borough's oldest surviving layout by some margin, founded in 1890 and set within Epping Forest itself. It's a 9-hole course designed by Tom Dunn, who went on to design Royal Cinque Ports, and it holds the distinction of being the second oldest club in the Essex Golf Union. The clubhouse was rebuilt in 1997, and the club marked its 125th anniversary in 2015, which gives some sense of how continuously it has operated through more than a century of change around it. Playing among Epping Forest's mature trees on a nine-hole course is a different pace of golf entirely from the two 18-hole parkland tests elsewhere in the borough, and it's a good option for a quicker evening round.
Ilford Golf Club rounds out the borough's offering, giving the town of Ilford its own home course alongside the golf available in Chigwell, Wanstead and Woodford Green.
What this means for a visiting golfer
With parkland courses accounting for half the recorded layouts here, Redbridge golf leans toward tree-lined fairways and well-defined holes rather than the open, exposed golf you'd find on a links course. The Epping Forest setting at Woodford adds a genuinely different texture, tighter and more wooded, while Hainault Forest's two Taylor-designed courses give visitors the rare chance to play two full 18-hole layouts from the same historic designer within a single visit. It's a compact borough, but between the forest edges and the parkland greens there's enough contrast here to fill a weekend without ever leaving Redbridge.