Mark Chalmers

History doesn’t repeat itself, said Mark Twain, but it does rhyme.  Even to the extent that I’ve used that quote at least once before... and spoken about Donald Trump’s plans for Balmedie, too.  As an introduction to the Menie Links, I thought it would be worth re-posting this article which was originally published on scottisharchitecture.com in 2006.

So Donald Trump hopes to build a golf course on the Menie estate at Balmedie, just north of Aberdeen.  The boy from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn will face obstacles… and perhaps some will prove to be intractable.  After all, the scheme has already stalled once.

Part of the area is a nature reserve: Balmedie is close to the Ythan estuary, which is of world importance for migratory birds.  The area also gets a world record amount of haar.  It's on the wrong (north) side of Aberdeen - have you ever tried to get from the city centre, through the Brig o’ Don then up past Blackdog, during the rush hour?  Trump’s director of golf, Ashley Cooper, calls Balmedie a “beachhead” in Europe.  That’s a poorly-chosen metaphor, since many ships have foundered along this stretch of coast.

"The £300 million project - his first golfing venture in a cool climate - will feature a five-star Victorian-style hotel," said an early press release.  You can imagine that a mock baronial clubhouse will take shape on the windswept coast, with its dreich grey granite houses and wind-blasted trees, although Mr Trump’s aspirations may stretch to something grander.  He already has a string of holding companies which own casinos, restaurants, a university, and of course other golf clubs.  The Trump website boasts of Los Angeles, Bedminster, Westchester, West Palm Beach and Canouan Island–  but Trump International Golf Links will be his first course outside continental America. 

By November 2006, the Menie scheme’s value had increased to £1 billion, and it was being touted as a saviour for this dead quarter of Aberdeenshire, which the Oil Rush had passed by.  However, recent arguments about the effectiveness of Scottish Enterprise's policy of "inward investment" raise doubts about Trump’s claims, and there is also the spectre of the political clout of inward investment will might Planning permissions to be bought, in the interests of injecting cash into the local economy. So much for democracy, and due process.

Although Trump’s supporters may compare the two figures, Trump isn't a latter day Andrew Carnegie, so may not be welcomed like Carnegie was at Skibo. Despite his claims to Scots blood on his mother’s side, he isn’t a native like Carnegie was.  He may have money, but he’s far far short of being the richest man in the world.  It’s more likely that Trump will be regarded like the Texas oilmen were in Bill Forsyth’s film, “Local Hero”, of which film-maker Bill Forsyth said–
“I saw it along the lines of a Scottish Beverly Hillbillies–  what would happen to a small community when it suddenly becomes very rich - that was the germ of the idea, and the story built itself from there.   It seemed to contain a similar theme to Brigadoon, which also involved some Americans coming to Scotland, becoming part of a small community, being changed by the experience and affecting the place in their own way.”

Architecturally, the images released so far depict a 450-bedroom hotel and palatial golf clubhouse which are rather like a diluted Disneyfied version of Cape Cod, with timber verandahs, shingled towers and festive bunting.  Trump’s architects haven’t taken the obvious source - Scots Baronial - and built a rugged castle from granite and slate.  After all, Slains Castle is nearby, but perhaps Trump’s American architects haven’t yet been affected by the place yet: maybe it will grow on them, as Ferness did in Local Hero.

A more serious question is whether we need yet another golf course?  Didn't the National Golf Centre at Drumoig (outside St Andrews) go bust just a couple of years ago?  Isn’t the future of the Carnoustie Golf Hotel - brainchild of developer Michael Johnston - currently in jeopardy?  Mr Trump should also remember that just up the coast from Balmedie there was a Victorian golf resort at Cruden Bay, built by the GNSR railway company as a resort: but it disappeared, hotel gone, tramway taken up.  As the Trump website says, “Up to the Second World War, Cruden Bay was a favoured holiday destination of the wealthy from the south, journeying up by train to a luxury hotel near the course which has since been demolished.”

Looking through the archives, the same claims made by Cruden Bay’s backers are being repeated by the Trump Organisation.  Investment, jobs, a catalyst for development, improving the area’s profile, better transport links et cetera… in the end, it was a case of Boosterism.  The hotel lost enormous amounts of money during the Great Depression, and it was forced to close in 1932.  During WW2 it was used by the Army to billet soldiers in, and by the end of the 1940’s it lay in disrepair, and was later sold for demolition.  The golf course remains and today the Cruden Bay Golf Club’s website boasts it is the “61st BEST COURSE IN THE WORLD”.  Only sixty places behind Menie Links, in fact.

Beyond that, there is concern about Scotland’s coastline becoming a monoculture.  Golf, even links golf courses, are an un-natural land use.  They are man-made.  The ecology of sand dunes is a shifting one, and dunes wander inland, choking grass and killing it.  That won’t be popular with the green-keepers.  Just like industrial farming, golf curtails diversity by controlling which species are allowed to grow, and controlling access to the land itself.  While bents and fescues may continue to grow in the rough, the varieties of grass on the fairways of golf links tend not to be native to the area.

At the moment, Trump’s plans are in for planning permission, and everything seems to be going fine: yet the protagonists of Local Hero discovered that the rights to the beach belong to an old beachcomber (played by Fulton Mackay, the prisoner governor in “Porridge”), who is determined not to sell them.  His tumbledown beach hut became the stumbling block which forced the American investors to think again.