When Urban Golf, the UK’s original indoor golf venue, opened its first indoor simulator experience in Soho, London in 2004 there was no signage, just a black door with a buzzer.

“We were probably too far ahead of our time when we started out,” admits James Day, Urban Golf’s founder and CEO.

Now, having celebrated its 20th birthday in September, Day believes “off course golf” is set for “a bit of a boom” — the market was valued at $1.3bn in 2023 — and could be bolstered further this month by the launch of TGL Golf, the tech-led indoor golf league set up by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy.

“It’s an interesting time to be in it,” says Day. “As long as we come up with sustainable business models that work, I can’t see a situation where indoor golf isn’t a really big thing in the UK in 10 years time.”

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As an indoor golf pioneer, Day, a former accredited tour pro, has also been at the forefront of technology. Following first generation “novelty’ bays in the 1990s with infrared sensors, Day entered the fray as the second generation took shape, with simulators reading off the ball not the club through radar tracking.

“It made a huge difference as it was more accurate and knew how far the ball was travelling,” says Day.

Today’s third gen tech is camera-led, which measures spin and gives even more ball-tracking accuracy indoors. At its premier London venue in Smithfield, Urban Golf has 11 simulators, with each bay costing around £50,000 to install.

The business, says Day, is turning over around £2m and the entrepreneur is buoyant on the future after an initial decision to spend thousands on upgrading six simulators when he had two sites, in Smithfield and Soho, the lease having now ended on the latter.

“I maintain that if we hadn’t done that we wouldn’t be around today,” says Day, who has partnered with Ohio-based aboutGolf simulators since 2008.

“It moved us into a zone where people brought their own clubs and took it more seriously. That’s what you need if you want to exist and get people to come back. Improving technology and being authentic has been a big difference for us.”

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From competitive socialising in an entertainment business, Day says golfer groups now “know the course they want to play and there’s a difference in the way people now interact with tech.”

Urban Golf has two planned sites for 2025 in the surrounding London area, with the vision to have an indoor centre in every UK city and growing its “Urban Golf at Home” arm as systems become less expensive to set up.

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Day says that the business will stick to the micro version, rather than needing larger premises and going outside the simulator to play on an actual green, which will be one of TGL Golf’s USPs. “The thing that makes a big difference to revenue is getting the right amount of simulators in there,” he says.

Day is a self-confessed golf addict. Born in High Wycombe, he later became assistant professional at Stoke Park Golf Club — made famous by James Bond’s Goldfinger — where he built up a client base of people who had businesses in London and were travelling out to play golf at weekends. Networking allowed him to accrue the investors who are still with the business today.

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His workshop at Urban Golf, a larger room called The Bunker, is also home to a collection of vintage golf clubs and was named “coolest room in golf” by leading golf YouTuber Rick Shiels.

Meanwhile, Day continues to monitor the latest trends in screen golf, having returned from a recent trip to South Korea, a nation with over 6,000 indoor golf businesses.

Now in its 21st year, Urban Golf originally launched as the first indoor simulator in the UK, alongside other indoor venues such as bowling’s All Star Lanes, with table tennis-themed Bounce and darts’ Flight Club also taking off in recent years.

“We don’t see ourselves as being quite uptight and serious as most of the [other] products in golf come across,” says Day.

“We are not aligned with any golf brand and we are just trying to do things our own way.”

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