From Ice Cream and Golf to Ecology and Innovation... this report and blueprint for the future explores the community, wildlife, history and holiday fun that make one of the Isle of Wight's best-loved attractions, Brown’s Golf Course, such an extraordinary public place. Browns is a remarkably intact example of 20th Century tourism heritage, set in coastal and wetland surrounds in beautiful Sandown Bay. Built in the 1930s by London entrepreneur Alexander Kennedy, its story includes celebrity golf and the WWII PLUTO pipeline. Taken over by the local authority then IW Zoo, by 2011 it had all but been forgotten until local enterprises, Arc, Artecology and a new Brown's team revived its fortunes.
Commissioned by The Common Space and Down to the Coast, the Browns CMP is the next step in revitalising the first Henry Cotton-designed 1930s golf course, celebrating its layers of natural, cultural and military heritage and year-round appeal, and bringing a new coastal Biosphere Centre to tangible life in the Bay.