Foxhills — The Country Club That Stopped Being Just a Golf Club

Surrey does country clubs well. Golf, spa, manor house, enough acreage to make London feel considerably further away than it is.

Foxhills has all of those things. Its more interesting story is how often the estate has changed what it is for.

Before the Golf

The land was once part of Chertsey Abbey's extensive holdings. Centuries later it became associated with Charles James Fox, the politician whose name survives in Foxhills today.

The estate changed more substantially after John Ivatt-Briscoe acquired the land in 1817. He commissioned George Basevi, cousin of Benjamin Disraeli and architect of Belgrave Square and Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum, to design the Manor House. It's an unusually distinguished architectural pedigree for a building now better known as the centrepiece of a country club.

The estate subsequently adapted to rather different circumstances. During the First World War, it became a convalescent home for wounded officers. During the Second, its land was used as part of the Dig for Victory campaign. Then came perhaps the least predictable owner of all.

When an Airline Bought a Surrey Estate

By the 1960s, Foxhills had fallen into decline. It was eventually acquired by Aer Lingus, which saw potential in the estate's proximity to Heathrow and diversified into leisure.

In 1975, the Irish airline opened Foxhills as a golf club. It wasn't the immediate success envisaged, and in 1983 Pam and Ian Hayton bought the business. The Hayton family remains behind Foxhills today, with their son Marc now chief executive. Golf remained central, but the definition of a country club gradually became much broader.

Beyond the Fairways

Foxhills still has serious golfing credentials. The Longcross and Bernard Hunt are its two 18-hole championship courses, while the nine-hole Manor course is where future Ryder Cup player Paul Casey developed his game as a junior member. Foxhills also hosted the PGA Cup in 2017 and 2022, the biennial contest between club professionals from Great Britain & Ireland and the United States.

But you can now spend an entire day at Foxhills without touching a golf club. Across its 400 acres are five swimming pools, tennis, padel and pickleball courts, a gym and fitness studios, woodland trails and a programme of more than 200 activities each week. The biggest physical expression of that change is The Pavilion, the 1,700-square-metre family and fitness hub opened in 2021 — indoor and outdoor pools sitting alongside studios, children's facilities and family dining. The old country-club hierarchy — golf first, everything else somewhere behind it — has largely disappeared.

A Different Kind of Wellness

The HealthSpa takes the same broad approach. There's an adults-only 20-metre indoor pool, sauna, steam room and hydro pool, while the spa garden adds a hot tub, sauna and natural pool outside. Elsewhere on the estate, a woodland Yoga Cabin puts some distance between exercise and the main buildings. Foxhills even keeps its own bees.

None of these things individually makes it unusual. What works is having them all within an estate large enough for different versions of the day to coexist. One person can disappear onto Longcross. Another can play padel, swim or take a class. Someone else can do very little beyond lunch and a walk through the woods. That flexibility is increasingly the point — the same instinct that runs through the rest of Edit No.28.

Back to the Manor

The latest changes have returned attention to the historic heart of the estate. A £1.5 million refurbishment of the Manor House has refreshed its food and drink spaces, including the arrival in April 2026 of Lomri, led by chef Achal Aggarwal. Its cooking takes India as its starting point while drawing on Aggarwal's international career and the historic trading routes between Britain and India — a long way from the conventional clubhouse menu, and perhaps another indication that Foxhills is still deciding what a Surrey country club can be.

Why It Earns Its Place

Foxhills isn't hidden. Nor is it trying to become something fashionable by discarding the golf courses and country-house history that built it. The interesting part is the accumulation: an abbey estate became a country house, then a wartime convalescent home, farmland, an airline-owned golf club, and eventually a family-owned resort where golf is now only one of several reasons to come.

That history makes the current Foxhills easier to understand. The estate has never stayed one thing for particularly long.