Spreading of Historic Golf Clubs

The map below shows every golf club in our database that is 100 years or older, appearing in the year it was founded. What starts as a scatter of dots along Scotland's east coast gradually becomes something else entirely.

For most of the 1700s and early 1800s, golf was almost entirely a Scottish pursuit. The clubs that appear in those early decades are concentrated around Edinburgh, St Andrews, and the Firth of Forth — the landscape where the modern game took shape. England follows, slowly at first, then Ireland, and by the mid-1800s a handful of clubs appear in the British colonies: India, Canada, Australia.

The pattern holds steadily until the 1880s, when something shifts. England begins producing clubs at a pace Scotland never matched in absolute numbers. By the 1890s the map is filling rapidly — not just in Britain but across continental Europe, North America, and southern Africa. The density around London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds reflects a specific moment: a sport that had been confined to a particular class and geography suddenly found both the audience and the infrastructure to go elsewhere.

The acceleration visible in the 1890s was not accidental. The affordable gutta-percha ball, England's suburban railway network, and a rapidly growing professional middle class all arrived together. In 1895 alone, our database records 100 clubs founded worldwide — the highest single-year total we have verified. The First World War brought it to an abrupt halt: founding activity drops sharply from 1914, and the map barely moves again until the 1920s.

What remains is the foundation. The clubs that survived that period — and the wars and economic disruptions that followed — are still operating today, most of them member-owned and embedded in their communities in much the same form as when they were founded.