A county built on parkland, with the Downs and the sea close by
West Sussex has 29 clubs spread from the Weald down to the coast, and parkland dominates the mix with 14 courses against three on the Downs, two heathland layouts and two links. That balance suits the geography: wooded, gently rolling ground inland around Crawley and Horsham, chalk downland further south, and a short stretch of coast at Littlehampton, Bognor Regis and Selsey. Green fees start from around £22, which keeps the county accessible for club golfers who want to play beyond their home course without planning a trip.
Crawley and Horsham: the parkland heartland
Crawley alone accounts for a cluster of long-established clubs. Copthorne Golf Club dates to 1892, was laid out by James Braid and then reworked with new holes between 1979 and 1984 by Bill Cox; it hosted the Sussex Amateur Championship in 2017 and still sits on common land. Next door, the Copthorne Village Artisans have been playing their own nine-hole course since 1903 and have belonged to the Artisan Golfers Association since 1923, with the John Slater Challenge Cup won seven times. Ifield Golf Club, opened in 1927, was designed by the same architects who redesigned Royal Birkdale and remains largely unaltered, its two loops of nine holes giving it a settled, old-fashioned feel. Cottesmore Golf & Country Club adds 27 holes of family-owned parkland with both a full 18 and a shorter nine. Over in Horsham, Rookwood offers undulating pay-and-play parkland with lakes and mature woodland, while Mannings Heath pairs its two courses with a Michelin-starred restaurant and a vineyard on site, useful to know if a round is turning into a longer day out. Haywards Heath, meanwhile, has Tom Mackenzie of Mackenzie & Ebert as design advisor and rewards accuracy over power across tree-lined, elevated ground with views to the Weald and South Downs.
Downs and heathland: Braid's other legacy
James Braid's fingerprints are all over West Sussex. As well as Copthorne, he designed Bognor Regis Golf Club in 1892, built by FG Hawtree and still member-owned, and Golf At Goodwood, opened in 1914 on estate woodland and regarded as one of his finest efforts. Pyecombe, founded in 1894, is another Braid downland course, set within the South Downs National Park and run with a deliberately light environmental touch. For something different in texture, Liphook Golf Club is proper heathland: sandy loam, heather and gorse laid out by Arthur Croome and Tom Simpson in 1922, ranked 55th in the UK and recognised by the R&A as an exemplary inland heathland course, with recent refinements by Mackenzie and Ebert. Cowdray Park at Midhurst, older still and set on free-draining sandy soil, plays year-round with views to Cowdray Ruins and the South Downs beyond.
Links golf on the coast
The two links courses sit at opposite ends of the seaside experience. Littlehampton Golf Club, founded in 1889, runs along the mouth of the River Arun towards Climping beach, with sea views at several points and wind that genuinely changes how the course plays from one day to the next; Golf World's October 2024 rankings placed it just outside the GB&I links top 100. Selsey Golf Club is a tighter nine-hole test by the beach, home to two of the toughest par 4s in Sussex and a closing par 3 of over 200 yards guarded by water. Max Faulkner, who won The Open in 1951, was once the club professional here, which says something about the pedigree tucked into a modest nine holes. Between the two, Ham Manor at Angmering brings Harry Colt's parkland design and an 18th-century manor house into the same stretch of coastline, a reminder that West Sussex golf rarely sticks to just one style for long.