A golf club in Berkshire that’s owned by the John Lewis Partnership as a benefit for its employees has been put up for sale, with a nearby club set to buy it.
The Winter Hill Golf Club site has been owned by the operator of the John Lewis department stores and Waitrose supermarkets for the last 85 years.
The 200-acre site was bought by John Lewis Partnership founder John Spedan Lewis in 1938 with the vision that he would create a golf course. However, the club was not opened until 1976, 13 years after his death, having been kept as farmland during the Second World War.
Since then, John Lewis staff have been able to get a discounted rate on membership for the golf club, although the club is also open to outside members.
While the club is treated as a benefit for employees, just 20 percent of Winter Hill Golf Club members are working or retired John Lewis Partnership staff and their family.
John Lewis told staff this week that it would be shutting the site by the end of April, with plans to sell the course, the clubhouse and two residential properties.
A spokesman said: “This isn’t a decision we took lightly. However, the golf club is no longer used as the employee benefit it once was, with just one in five members now having a link to the partnership.
“With a high level of investment required, for a very small internal audience, we have decided that Winter Hill is no longer the best use of our resources.”
The John Lewis Partnership is due to make £350 million in debt repayments by the middle of 2025.
John Lewis is in talks with nearby golf club Maidenhead Golf Club, which is considering moving to the site.
Maidenhead’s chairman, Paul Louden, said the club is expecting to exchange contracts within the next two months.
The 132-acre Maidenhead club has until the end of 2025 to leave the site after it relinquished its lease to its local council for a reported nearly £16 million in order to enable the development of up to 1,800 homes, a primary, secondary, and nursery school, a local centre, and public open space.
Louden said: “We think it’s a great opportunity to survive. Maidenhead Golf Club will be 127 years old this year and we don’t want to throw that away.
“It’s trying to get that success continuing and [the purchase] would be great because Maidenhead doesn’t want to lose two golf courses in a space of a few months, which is where we’re at if members don’t vote for it.
“It’s very difficult to see what the other alternatives are.”
Once the contracts are exchanged, 400 Maidenhead Golf Club members will vote at the next extraordinary general meeting if they want to move to Winter Hill.
Leave a Reply