Partner Article

John Adamson on developments at Ramside

It’s fair to say that the past week has been one of the busiest of my life.

On Monday, we launched a new £15m leisure and golf development at Ramside Hall Hotel to the media and on Friday, I got married.

What a week, both for myself and for Ramside Estates Ltd, the hospitality company my late father founded almost 50 years ago.

My father and I have talked about building a second championship golf course at Ramside Hall Hotel and Golf Club since 2004 and finally the golf course designers have started marking out the shape of the holes.

It’s been a long term vision for our business to consolidate our position as County Durham’s leading hotel and golf resort and make it even better so that we sit among the elite in North East and UK golf destinations.

We have committed to investing £15m in the golf resort and hotel over the next three years including building an 18-hole championship golf course, spa and leisure centre with 25 metre swimming pool, hydrotherapy pool, 12 treatment rooms, cardio cycling studio, hairdressing salon, restaurant and café.

48 new bedrooms will be added to our four star hotel taking the bed stock up to 130.

Ramside has always stood for good value and exceptional quality and this will remain at the heart of our business.

Members of the existing Ramside Hall Hotel and Golf Club will be able to enjoy 36-holes of first-class golf for around the same price they now pay for 27 holes.

Visitors to the club will now have two reasons to stay longer, play more golf and spend more in the local economy.

At the same time, we are building 34 executive homes in secluded and picturesque locations bordering the new golf course and a 1,000 seat conference hall; that can be used for exhibitions, conferences and large scale entertainment events.

Thirteen homes will be situated at Hilltop Farm, Carville, on former farmland where the new course will be built, and 21 homes will be built on the site of today’s 25th and 26th holes at the current golf course.

This is a development that opens up a number of new markets for Ramside Estates Ltd and which strengthens our established position in the golf and hotel markets. It will also have long standing benefit for the local Durham and North East economy.

We estimate that we’ll create 104 new jobs and generate around £11m of additional tourism spend in the visitor economy per year. Today, our business employs 550 people and visitors to Ramside Hall Hotel and Golf Club alone bring £2.67m into the regional economy.

Some may say it’s a brave move given the current state of the economy. It wasn’t long ago that “credit crunch” were the words on everyone’s lips and what followed was a boom in domestic UK tourism and “staycationing” soon became the buzzword.

The North East has done well over the past decade, attracting more than £4bn pound year in tourism spend and around 9 million people staying overnight in the region annually.

The development has an extra special significance as we are aiming to complete it by September 2013, which coincidentally is the 50th anniversary of Ramside Estates Ltd trading as a privately owned North East hospitality business. Exciting times.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .