Opening Golf to the World
Ipswich Golf Club
Ipswich Golf Club have pursued an ambitious project to harvest water from a neighbouring supermarket site and store onsite for later reuse. This required detailed liaison with site neighbours, Environment Agency and Natural England.
Ipswich Golf Club has a current abstraction licence allowing 10,000 m² (226 m³ per day) from an onsite spring-fed lake. Due to local resource constraints, it is not possible to directly increase this allocation. With a total annual irrigation demand of approximately 30,000 m³, supplementary use of mains water is needed when fairways are irrigated. However, water from this source is restricted to overnight hours between 23:00 and 06:00, with a yield of only 26.6 m³ per hour. To address long-term water shortfalls, Ipswich GC developed an innovative drainage-water harvesting project. Following discussions with the Environment Agency, the club secured approval to divert drainage water from a nearby Sainsbury’s store and an adjoining residential estate into their existing pond. Although no formal abstraction licence is required for this inflow, the club must maintain pond levels within prescribed limits. A purpose-built catch chamber fitted with dual pumps slows incoming flow and measures salinity before transfer. Debris capture remains an ongoing operational challenge, and the club is liaising with Sainsbury’s to improve pre-entry filtration. A system of float switches manages overflow, while a syphon pipe transfers captured water to a new reservoir and back into irrigation system as required. The centrepiece of the project is a new 26,500 m³ reservoir. Although design ambitions included a deeper profile, excavation encountered groundwater, limiting depth. Construction required woodland removal, offset under CSS stewardship planning obligations. Planning permission took two years, accounting for roughly 30% of the total £500k project cost, including ecology, archaeology and design fees. Reservoir construction concluded in December 2024 and reached near-full capacity by January 2025. The club is now progressing towards a fully upgraded irrigation system projected to increase efficiency by 30%, improve coverage and reduce labour-intensive hand-watering across large areas.