I've been in golf a long time and it's not often I see a golf club on a Saturday night looking like it did at Middlesbrough Municipal last night when Manjaros Kitchen and Cocktails opened its doors. The place was absolutely rammed with people from the town who had just come along to see what all the fuss was about.
To understand why it meant so much you need to go back to April 2025 when we took on Middlesbrough Municipal and added it to the Link Golf UK portfolio. It's a fantastic 18 hole course with a driving range that should have been one of the best public golf facilities in the North East, but it had been starved of investment for years and you could see it everywhere you looked. The clubhouse was dated and tired, there was a kitchen in the building that was never open, you could get food once in a blue moon if you were lucky and the customers who kept turning up week after week deserved a lot more than they were getting. The range wasn't much better either with old mats and golf balls that had seen far better days, which isn't what anyone wants when they've come down after work to hit a bucket or bring the kids for their first go.
When we announced what we planned to do there were plenty of people who thought we'd lost the plot and a few who were convinced we were going to ruin the place. I get that, because people don't always like change and when it's a club you've been part of for years you're naturally going to be protective of it. Twenty months and £1.4 million later I'd like to think we've shown what we meant.
We started with the range and gave it a full refurb, putting in TrackMan Range. Next to it we built a brand new bar that serves everybody, range customers, pay and play golfers and members all in the same place, because I've never believed a golf club should be split into people who belong and people who don't. What we've ended up with is a proper community hub that's open from 7am until 11pm every day with hot food and drinks on seven days a week, which for a club that could barely manage a bacon sandwich not so long ago is quite something.
The course needed plenty of love too so we've put money into new machinery, brought in a new maintenance programme and given our greenkeeping team the backing they need to take the course up a level, which they're doing. We've finished a lot of drainage work and we'll shortly start building a buggy path on the last six holes so buggies can go out all year round, which matters a lot to golfers who rely on them to keep playing through the winter.
The biggest change though is the clubhouse, where Manjaros have taken a tired old fashioned building and turned it into a modern and lively restaurant that honestly has to be seen to be believed. If you're anywhere near Middlesbrough I'd really recommend going, whether you play golf or not.
What's pleased me most is what we've been hearing from the people who know the club best. The feedback from members and visitors has been fantastic and the staff who came over to Link Golf UK from the previous operator have told us how good it is to finally see money going back into their club. They've really bought into what we're about when it comes to growing the game and getting more people playing.
Standing there last night looking round a full restaurant with a real buzz about the place I couldn't help thinking about how much this team has done in such a short space of time. Change isn't always comfortable but once people see what we're offering most of them come round pretty quickly because they can see the club is moving forward. This is only the start at Middlesbrough and there's more coming over the next few months that I'm looking forward to sharing.
If you're involved with a golf club that's thinking about Link Golf UK as an option, or you're just curious about what we actually do, then get yourself over to Boro and see it for yourself. Talk to the staff, the members, the committee and the customers, because hearing it from them will tell you far more than I ever could about whether we do what we say we're going to do.