Kent, United Kingdom

The Royal St Georges Golf Club (1017145)

William Laidlaw Purves founded St. George’s in 1887 with the ambition of carrying the ethos and traditions of St. Andrews into southern England. The Sandwich setting gave that project a landscape of its own.

Course: 18 holes · par 70
Original architect: William Laidlaw Purves

The course

The Royal St Georges Golf Club18 holes · par 70

Course design

William Laidlaw PurvesOriginal design · The Royal St Georges Golf Club · 1887

An English counterpart to St. Andrews

In 1894, St. George’s became the first venue outside Scotland to host The Open. Collin Morikawa’s victory in 2021 continued a championship association that had begun more than a century earlier.

Championships

View all 16 past editions

Results and dates 16 editions

The Open Championship

1894
The 34th Open
J.H. Taylor
1899
The 39th Open
Harry Vardon
1904
The 44th Open
Jack White
1911
The 51st Open
Harry Vardon
1922
The 57th Open
Walter Hagen
1928
The 63rd Open
Walter Hagen
1934
The 69th Open
Henry Cotton
1938
The 73rd Open
Reg Whitcombe
1949
The 78th Open
Bobby Locke
1981
The 110th Open
Bill Rogers
1985
The 114th Open
Sandy Lyle
1993
The 122nd Open
Greg Norman
2003
The 132nd Open
Ben Curtis
2011
The 140th Open
Darren Clarke
2021
The 149th Open
Collin Morikawa

The Amateur Championship

1997
Craig Watson

Sources and editorial notes5 references

Sources for this story

The Club Royal St George’s Golf Club
Main historical account, course development and individual-hole descriptions.
Consulted 2026-09-21
Passages:Introduction An English counterpart to St. Andrews, paragraph 2

Record sources

Royal St Georges Course Guide Now Live | The Open
The Open Records and Statistics The official Champion Golfers register directly enumerates this playing with ordinal, venue, and champion. Historical venue and champion spellings follow that register; any trailing parenthesized win count is occurrence metadata and is not part of the recorded winner name. The official Previous Opens decade record independently cross-checks the reviewed identity. Dates are null because the reviewed register does not state them, and no date was inferred.
The Open: championship venues The official Open venue directory, historical guide, and named Course evidence bind this continuing venue identity. Historical routing and scoring conditions are not replaced by current scorecard values. Championship venue source: www.theopen.com; Club location source: www.theopen.com. The 2026 Royal Birkdale result is separately verified by the bound final-round report.
The R&A: official Amateur championship results R&A official results book, 1997, PDF pages 289–292. Reported book dates retained in the source facts only until competitive-day boundaries are corroborated. This selected chronology is incomplete.