Just four golf resorts have achieved recognition by The Sunday Times in their new Top 100 British Hotels list, published last weekend (October 13).
Tewkesbury Park in Gloucestershire, which recently completed a £10m facelift, is the only golf resort in the southern half of Great Britain to make the list.
Rockliffe Hall in the north east, plus Schloss Roxburghe and Gleneagles in Scotland, were also named by The Sunday Times as having hotels of extraordinary quality worthy of a Top 100 ranking. With approximately 45,000 hotels in Great Britain, the authoritative Sunday Times list is acknowledged as one of the hardest to get into in the hotel world, and one of the most prestigious.
Describing the process of picking their top 100 British hotels as ‘a mighty struggle’, The Sunday Times selected Tewkesbury Park for ‘the views, the unstuffy vibe and the seclusion’. The newspaper also highlighted the 93-bedroom hotel’s ‘first rate’ Mint restaurant and its inventive food, its indoor pool, its family-friendly lawns and its nine suites with freestanding baths and Hypnos beds.
Tewkesbury Park’s General Manager, Patrick Jones, arrived to head the team there in 2015 after spending almost three years managing another Sunday Times Top 100 Hotel – Peter de Savary’s boutique hotel The Old Swan & Minster Mill in Oxfordshire. Speaking after this year’s The Sunday Times announcement, Jones said: “We’re absolutely thrilled to have made it into The Sunday Times top 100 hotels list, and see this as a real stamp of approval. It reflects the high standards of service, hospitality and facilities which all of our guests can now enjoy when they visit us.”
In April 2014, the McIntosh family bought Tewkesbury Park with the aim of restoring the then-rundown resort to become one of England’s premier country house hotels. In 2016, golf architect Peter McEvoy oversaw an extensive re-bunkering and re-conditioning project to restore the 6,554-yard course to original architect Frank Pennink’s vision. The resort’s transformation was completed in late 2018, when its acclaimed new Mint restaurant opened, bringing the five-year restoration project to a close.
Tewkesbury Park also currently features in two separate Top 100 Golf Resorts in GB & Ireland lists, and it was named Best UK & Ireland Hotel for Weddings, Parties & Special Occasions in the Condé Nast Johansens 2019 Awards For Excellence. It has also been short-listed again for the 2020 Condé Nast Johansens awards.