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Of the 10 modern Open Championship rota golf courses, Royal Birkdale Golf Club got the latest start in hosting what is currently the year's final men's major. Some 65 years after the club's original founding and 60 years after it moved to its current site in the dunes south of Southport on England's west coast, it welcomed the 1954 Open Championship, where Australia's Peter Thomson took the Claret Jug for the first time in his storied career.
Across 10 total playings - the 11th happening in 2026 - the list of Open Champions at Birkdale is phenomenal. Among them, all but 1991 champion Ian Baker-Finch are multiple-time major champions, a list that bears spelling out due to its quality:
1954: Peter Thomson
1961: Arnold Palmer
1965: Peter Thomson
1971: Lee Trevino
1976: Johnny Miller
1983: Tom Watson
1991: Ian Baker-Finch
1998: Mark O'Meara
2008: Padraig Harrington
2017: Jordan Spieth
For decades, Birkdale has been a crucible for canny linksmen. In addition to Thomson's first, both he and Watson captured their respective fifth Open Championships there. Add to the list great female champions like Dame Laura Davies (1986) and Yani Tseng (2010) who have won Women's Opens there. The course was also the site of the famous 1969 Ryder Cup and "The Concession" moment between Jack Nicklaus and Tony Jacklin. By pedigree and history, Birkdale is as faithful a major championship host golf course as there is.
Royal Birkdale Golf Club and the 2026 Open Championship
Par 70, 7,223 yards
(+67 yards since the 2017 Open Championship)
76.5 Rating
151 Slope
5 things you need to know about Royal Birkdale Golf Club, home of the 2026 Open Championship
A no-nonsense links (relatively). Royal Birkdale tends to rank highly on well-traveled pros' lists of Open venues because it is as straightforward a test as the rota offers. This is because the system of dunes in which the course sits lends itself to holes being routed through the valleys, leaving fairways with mostly subtle undulation, if any. The sorts of squirrelly, awkward lies that confront and confound players at places like Royal St. George's and The Old Course are kept to a minimum. So are blind shots. The pro-golfer adage "It's all right there in front of you" is largely true at Birkdale.
Not just pots. The bunkering is always a big story around The Open Championship. Fans and home viewers know to expect small, sunken pot bunkers that seem to have their own gravity to gobble up golf balls and require pitch-outs as well as awkward stances. There are plenty of those at Royal Birkdale, but there are also several more naturalistic-looking bunkers with irregular edges and somewhat less stacked sod than is the traditional aesthetic. This varied bunker scheme is largely the result of...
Recent design changes. Since Royal Birkdale hosted the 2017 Open Championship, architects Tom Mackenzie and Mike Howard of the firm of Mackenzie & Ebert have overseen both subtle and significant changes to the Birkdale links. In addition to the aforementioned naturalization of much of the bunkering, Mackenzie has overhauled the overall aesthetic of many of the areas surrounding the holes, pulling away vegetation in order to expose more sand than ever amongst the dunescape. The short par-4 5th hole was massaged to encourage more players to try to drive the green, which sits about 310 from the championship tee. Going somewhat against trend, the par-3 7th has been shortened by about 25 yards via a new tee behind the 6th green that turns it into Birkdale's answer to Royal Troon's fear Postage Stamp short hole. On the inward nine, the 13th hole, which Jordan Spieth made famous with his wild tee shot to the right in 2017 has been reconfigured such that the driving range-adjacent spot Spieth played from is no longer in bounds. Mackenzie and Howard also convinced the club to remove the traditional par-3 14th hole from the routing in order to accommodate...
A brand-new 15th hole. Among the extensive design changes undertaken by Mackenzie and Howard at Royal Birkdale since the 2017 Open Championship is the brand-new 15th hole, a fearsome 241-yard par 3 inserted into the routing after a par 5 that was the 15th and is now the 14th was repositioned and its green moved some 75 yards downrange and to the right. The new 15th green, angled from front-right to back-left and raised above bunkers left and hollows right, will likely be one of the most elusive in regulation, especially in any sort of crosswind or into-the-wind situation. The tee shot aims straight at Royal Birkdale's steamship-like clubhouse, looming in the distance and reminding players that four volatile holes separate them from the Claret Jug.
One last thing. Royal Birkdale's 18th hole, one of the toughest finishers in the Open rota, also received a bit of a rethink in recent years. Mackenxie and Howard extended the hole by about 20 yards by shifting its championship tee box about 90 yards to the left, from a spot behind the 17th green to its new position to the left of it. As a result, the hole morphed from a dogleg-right into a more straightaway test, albeit with a sinewy fairway and half a dozen bunkers disrupting the racing line. Now, a player who stands on the final tee needing to make a final good score on Sunday will have to confront the sight of the entire Open Championship canyon of grandstands.
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