Mark Chalmers

With today’s news that The Donald has become the 47th president of the US, I had a dig through the archives for something topical, then remembered that I wrote a piece for The Lighthouse website (scottisharchitecture.com) in December 2006. Interesting to see whether my writing has aged any better than America’s new, 80 year-old president.  He was a mere 62 years old at that point, a previously-bankrupt property developer and a TV host with little promise of what was to come.

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 insurmountable. The scheme has already stalled once. Part of the area is a nature reserve, and Balmedie is close to the Ythan estuary which is an area of world importance for migratory birds. The Ythan 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.

"The £300 million project – his first golfing venture in a cool climate – will feature a five-star Victorian-style hotel," trumpeted an early press release. You can well imagine that a mock-Baronial clubhouse will take shape on the windswept coast, along with dreich fake-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 scheme’s development value had inflated to £1 billion.

Although Trump’s supporters may compare the two men, Trump isn't a latter-day Andrew Carnegie. He may not be welcomed to Scotland with open arms, like Carnegie was to Skibo. Despite his claim to Scots blood on his mother’s side, he isn’t a native Scot like Carnegie. Trump may have made money, but he’s far short of being the richest man in the world. It’s more likely that he will be regarded along the same lines as the Texas oilmen 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 clubhouse which are rather like a dilute Disney vision of Cape Cod, with timber verandahs, corner towers and festive bunting. Trump’s architects haven’t even taken the obvious cliché source, Scots Baronial, and built a rugged great castle from granite and slate. After all, Slains Castle is nearby, but seems that the architects haven’t yet been affected by the place. Rather than Cape Cod or Baronial, the site’s bleakness is actually more suited to low clusters of buildings with enwrapping courtyards, and shelter belts of pine trees – not a bluff, six-storey frontage facing out to the grey sea.

The more serious point is, do we really need yet another golf course? Didn't the National Golf Centre at Drumoig (outside St Andrews) go bust just a year or two ago? Drumoig was a financial disaster for its developers, Torith. It was intended as the directors' "pension plan", but during its last year, it reportedly haemorrhaged money. Of course someone stepped in and took it over when they ran out of cash – after all, land is still an asset with a value. But that isn't the same as it being a roaring success. Isn’t the future of the Carnoustie Golf Hotel, brainchild of developer Michael Johnston, also currently in jeopardy? The Royal and Ancient is one thing, perhaps, but establishing a new course where once there was nothing?

I'll always remember watching a Concorde fly in to RAF Leuchars during the Open Championship in St Andrews a few years ago. An hour later, it set off on its take-off run and after a pause at the holding point, the captain opened up the four Olympus turbojets to full reheat. You saw the irises at the ends of the jet pipes dilating, the engines spooled up, and the sound of 144,000 horsepower was indescribable. Concorde accelerated like a rocket. The point of this excursus is that the aircraft was the draw for me, not its self-loading cargo of middle-aged "sportsmen" in ill-coordinated knitwear. Golfers and football casuals are the only people to wear Pringle diamond sweaters with Burberry checked scarves. What does that say about their fashion sense?

More importantly, what does the golfers’ ability to charter the fastest aircraft in the world say about the nature of golf? It’s just a money racket. That is its attraction for Trump, because the golf course is intended as an enabling development for housing. It’s also worth noting that the power of inward investment can indirectly enable Planning approvals to be bought, in the interests of injecting cash into the local economy. So much for democracy, and due process. I won't build here unless you let me do what I will: that's Trump's threat, and that seems tantamount to bribery.

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 holiday 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 repeated by the Trump Organisation – Magnificent Views, Splendidly Equipped, World Class Facilities and so on.

Beyond that, there is also the worry about Scotland’s coastline becoming a monoculture. Golf courses, even those built on coastal links, are an un-natural land use. They’re man-made. The ecology of sand dunes is shifting, 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.

At the moment, Trump’s plans are in for planning permission, and everything seems to be going fine – just like the protagonists of Local Hero, until they discover 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 becomes the stumbling block which causes the Americans to think again. Perhaps those who don’t understand the mistakes of history are condemned to repeat them.

2024 footnote:
I was wrong: Trump doesn’t appear to have been changed at all by the experience of developing Menie. Instead he pressed on in typical Trumpist fashion, devoting a lot of hype and hot air to the project, then turned away to his political ambitions when the hard work had barely begun. Menie is only half-developed – although considering what Trump might have done there, perhaps that’s a good thing.