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One morning in Sandbach, a neighbour appeared at Graham Warner’s door with a large folder: a delivery, she said, from an unidentified source.
“I think you’ll find this very interesting. Happy reading,” she said.
Warner was checking into a planned housing development behind his home. But the folder contained astonishing material not about the development but about the golf course next door to it, roughly 100 metres (330ft) away. The 18‑hole course stretches across a narrow strip of land, about two kilometres by 400 metres, bordered by Cheshire dairy pastures, with the old Trent and Mersey canal running alongside it. The British golfing legend Ian Woosnam used to train young golfers here.
For years Tony Minshall, the leaseholder of the Malkins Bank golf course between 2011 and 2025, had been getting increasingly alarmed about what he had understood to be a fairly straightforward old landfill beneath the greens. He remembers that in 2017, “one of the machines fell into a methane chamber one day and I went down to look at it and all it was covered with was a piece of old hardboard and an old carpet. The smell was horrendous. At that time the council did come back and cap them, but it took them two and a half years. So we were left with fences in the middle of the golf course around 13 methane chambers.”
He tried to get the council to take more action and was told that it would take £1.3bn “to remediate the whole site and take the waste away”. This was the first time that Minshall was told that the course had been officially classed as contaminated six years earlier. He still, however, did not grasp what that meant or how extensive the dumping was.
“I didn’t know about contaminated land. I’m a golfer, I’m not a contaminated land expert.”
Then, during heavy rain in November 2022, foul-smelling substances rose to the surface, killing grass and some trees, and spilling into the river, Minshall recalls. A report by Obsidian Environmental found that a lack of proper landfill capping and inadequate drainage allowed rainwater into the site, forcing leachate up to the surface.
As the folder of documents would subsequently reveal, beneath Malkins was not just an old landfill, but thousands of barrels of toxic chemicals – waste that periodically seeped to the surface. This course, as one report put it, “hides the fact that this particular spot was once one of the worst areas of dereliction in Cheshire, perhaps even in the UK as a whole”.
This piece of land has a long industrial history. In the mid-Victorian era about 1864, it was operated as a salt works, extracting brine from underground shafts across the area. After that it became an alkali works, and then, according to a letter between the Environment Agency and Defence Estates in 2004, the evidence clearly suggests that the site produced ammonium nitrate for bombs during the first world war and munitions filling might have also taken place there. It was turned into a waste tip in 1950. But it was during the 1960s, when “indiscriminate tipping” began, that the problems really kicked off, as the reports in the folder document.
One handwritten dump log – presumably by a worker at the tip – from 1968 reveals that in a single month in March, over 1000 tonnes of waste, ranging from waste lime, tannery waste, and unspecified “loose waste” and “waste in drums” were dumped from various companies including the chemical firms ICI and Shell. A company called Purle Group is also listed as a regular dumper; it was reported to have disposed of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in Cheshire during the 1970s – carcinogenic “forever chemicals” banned in the UK in the 1980s.
“My friend had a farm next to the golf course and it was common knowledge in the late 60s that ICI were coming at midnight and just getting rid of all the drums of acid on the golf course,” says Dave Parry, a former Malkins Bank employee.
Night dumping was also reported by residents living closest to the tip, and local residents were up in arms over the “tom cat” and “rotten eggs” smells. But years of legal wrangling were needed to close the tip, and the council recovered just £12,000 from the owner to cover its £5,000 legal bill and the site’s reclamation costs.
A report at that time (1973) by John Long, Cheshire’s assistant country planning director, describes the 24-hectare (60-acre) site as “a heap of many thousands of drums containing a variety of toxic substances mixed among brine sludge … In the centre of the tip there are two shallow lakes which are heavily contaminated with chemicals waste and oil and into which considerable numbers of drums have been tipped, some filled with industrial waste which are likely to explode in certain conditions.”
Barrels of hazardous sodium cyanide were thought to be present and concern was raised about waste leaking into the network of old salt caverns and brine runs under the site, which could potentially lead to subsidence in the future.
There is even a handwritten note in the council file where a conversation with “a man from Stockport” was recounted, saying that “he made use of Malkins Bank Tip to dispose of radioactive waste which he could not dispose of elsewhere”. Radiation surveys were undertaken by the National Radiological Protection Board in 1985 and again in 2002, which concluded: “It is reasonably practicable to determine there is no additional risk to persons on the golf course arising from any past disposal of radioactive material.”
Yet despite the toxicity of the waste, the council concluded that the site’s “optimum afteruse” was as a golf course. Reclamation took four years, with workers reportedly forced to stop regularly to wash chemical vapours from their eyes. In 1980, the council-owned golf course opened.
For 30 years, reports noted foul odours and leachate breaking through the surface, killing off the grass. Tests kept turning up heavy metals and substances such as benzene and toluene at concentrations classed as serious contamination – the kind that usually demands cleanup – and by 2003, officials were recommending more investigation.
In 2011, Cheshire East council officially said the land contaminated after pollution was found spreading through the groundwater beneath the site. Remediation options were explored, but because the water was not used for drinking and human exposure was considered minimal, the cost was ultimately deemed disproportionate to the likely environmental benefit.
Now, 15 years on, the full picture of the toxic legacy beneath the golf course is coming into focus thanks to the documents, which Warner later discovered had belonged to a former councillor, Vera Platt, now deceased. She had long been worried about the lack of action and the potential health impacts on the community, and had kept a copy of all the evidence at her home. The documents have left many shocked and frustrated that they knew so little about the hazardous nature of Malkins Bank.
From the public footpath, pipes can be seen sticking out of the 15th fairway into the Birchenwood Brook, which runs through the landfill before joining the River Wheelock. The soil around the pipes is a bright rust orange, slicked with an oily rainbow sheen surface. It smells of hydrocarbons with a whiff of rotten eggs.
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“It’s a disaster waiting to happen,” Warner says. A few years ago he found a fine rust‑orange dust coating his basement, which he believes was blown in with a pocket of landfill gas. He sees it as a sign the contamination is moving underground through the brine runs.
“It’s like a big chemical soup underneath the grass,” says Karen Mason, whose husband, David, played golf for many years on the course. “I’m utterly disgusted and I’m really outraged by it because they have endangered people recklessly for their own gain. Because they wanted money out of them. They knew they were endangering people, there’s loads of documents from the 90s, they knew it was contaminated and because they couldn’t get funding they ignored it.”
Minshall leased the land from the council in 2011, a day after the land was designated as contaminated. But he says this fact was never disclosed to him by the council, nor was it brought up in property searches.
“I didn’t know it was contaminated land. If I knew that I would never have touched it in a million years. It’s not fit for anyone to be on, let alone play golf on it,” Minshall says. His company has now gone into liquidation and the impact on him has been devastating, financially, emotionally and physically.
“The council don’t want to know. They don’t want to pay the remediation costs. But they have to live with what they’ve done to me and the people. My other businesses supported it for years because we thought we could get it back after the 2022 floods. This stuff was all over the fairway and it drove customers away. It killed the business. I lost my leg in 2021 and I think it had something to do with it.”
Defra records show about 100 historical landfills beneath golf courses in England and Wales, though documentation such as this is rare.
“The documents say what’s been dumped there will continue to be toxic for 100 years,” says Warner.
A Cheshire East council spokesperson has said: “The council has undertaken detailed investigation and ongoing management of the former Malkins Bank landfill site, which has operated as a golf course for several decades.
“The site was determined as contaminated land in 2011 due to risks to controlled waters. However, specialist investigations have concluded that it is suitable for its current use, with assessments consistently finding low risk to human health, including after flooding events.
“The council continues to monitor the site and is progressing a planning application to address drainage issues and improve site conditions.
“The council does not hold complete financial records for the site dating back to 1980. In the past five years, a previous tenancy ended due to insolvency, and no income has been received while discussions with potential sustainable new operators continue.”
According to the Environment Agency it does not regulate the site, but has supported Cheshire East council in tackling emissions from the former waste area to reduce environmental risks, but no pollution incidents have been logged since June 2020.
“The information provided is deeply concerning. The chemicals identified are persistent and potentially very harmful. As these sites age there is increasing likelihood that their capping will fail and that they will flood. A golf course was built here in the 1980s – almost 50 years ago. I would advise reappraising that use,” advises Prof Kate Spencer, a landfill specialist at Queen Mary University of London.
Under current legislation the responsibility for these sites often falls to the local authority but, according to Spencer, “we need to find a mechanism to make the polluters accountable”.
Under the current leaseholder, the golf course now has a zip line and bouncy castles for children. The leaseholders of the Malkins golf course did not respond to requests for comment.
Back in 1973, Long rang an early alarm bell: “With hindsight one could say Malkin’s Bank Tip should never have happened. It’s an example of the inadequacy of legislation and opportunism on the part of industry … tomorrow’s generation will not lightly forgive us for such lethal eyesores in their environment.”
