THE COUNCIL has thrown its weight behind a scheme to rewild a golf course and turn it into a “wildlife corridor”.

Brighton and Hove city council has been inviting proposals to let Waterhall and Hollingbury golf courses for the next 25 years when their leases expire in March.

Originally, the council said the land could remain as golf courses. But at one site, that now looks unlikely.

A council report released on Monday revealed the preferred leaseholder for Waterhall golf course is a community interest company hoping to restore chalk grasslands on the site.

The proposal is that the site will act as a wildlife corridor to connect nearby nature sites.

The council said a second phase of the plan would be to build an education centre with a classroom. It is hoped it would host between 1,000 and 3,000 children and adults each year on educational visits.

It said there would be volunteering days where local residents could help out and learn about the conservation efforts. The group would seek volunteers with experience in education or ecology to run educational trips.

The plan for Hollingbury golf course is less clear. One bidder hopes to run the site as a golf course, and there is also a plan to turn the clubhouse into a space for activities to promote health and wellbeing.

Both courses remain open at present but Hollingbury could be mothballed if there are no satisfactory bids. If this happens, it said the course and clubhouse would deteriorate and could become too expensive to restore.

The drive to rewild the courses has been gathering momentum in recent weeks. A rewilding petition by the climate action group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has attracted more than 2,000 signatures.

Its author Claudia Fisher welcomed the news, saying: “This sounds like a proposal that meets the council’s commitment to tackle the climate crisis.

“I’m happy this is being entertained and it seems the report has been very careful about the future of people working at the sites.”

However, some golfers were frustrated with the plans. Waterhall club member Tony Parsley accused the XR campaigners of “latching on to a current fad”.

He said: “This is uninformed nonsense. These people are interfering but they probably haven’t been near the place. It’s already green. The course is already and always has been chalk grassland. This is what makes it so suitable for golf. It drains very well and the grass is resilient and recovers quickly after dry spells.”

But XR stressed their relationship with the golf clubs is amicable. They said they had even been offered golf-buggy lifts to carry them to a planned demonstration at Hollingbury on Saturday.