Tom
Noted. As an aside, I wonder how much work in the UK is done in the name of restoration and how much is done because it was what the architect thought best given the brief he/she was given ? It seems to me that the restoration craze hasn't really hit the UK as yet to the same extent as the US but not being in the biz I could very well be wrong in that regard.
As a matter of interest, your work at Woodhall, is that a restoration ?
No, you are right, restoration is not much of a thing in the UK as of now. The old links that date from before 1900 have necessarily gone through multiple expansions, so there is no obvious version to restore them to [other than, the pre- Peter Dawson era]. Some of the heathland courses are starting to think about restoration vs. further renovation, though, as they all value their history and can trace it back to Colt or Willie Park or Abercromby.
As for Woodhall Spa, they didn't ask for a restoration: the assignment was simply to make the bunkers functional again. A lot of them had been dug deeper by Col. Hotchkin's son in the 70's and 80's, to the point where they couldn't keep the faces maintained at all. They didn't want to restore them to shallower, necessarily, but they wanted to make them work.
Anyway, we fixed up the bunkers that were there and restored a few [but not all of the] lost bunkers, and took down a bunch of pine trees that didn't used to be there. We shifted a couple of bunkers slightly, but didn't add any bunkers of our own. It's Hotchkin's most famous course, and I didn't want to start adding my own ideas, even if they might have let me.
The only thing we changed was the angle of the 5th hole, moving the tee to the right of #4 green to get it out of the danger zone between #2 and #4 greens. I swung the green around some in the process, so the angle back to the new tee would be less severe, and more similar to how it played from the left.