Britain’s Lost Racecourses

In March 1918, a jockey named Ernest Piggott won the Grand National over fences built to Aintree’s exact measurements — four miles, 856 yards, twenty-nine of them — on a wide green course in Surrey. Except it wasn’t quite the Grand National, and the course isn’t there any more. You’ve probably stood on it. It’s under a runway at Gatwick.

Forty-five years later, in November 1963, his grandson Lester rode the last race ever run at Manchester’s Castle Irwell, in front of more than twenty thousand people who’d come to say goodbye. One family, two vanished tracks, the length of this whole story between them.

Britain has lost a lot of racecourses. Not a handful — dozens. Grand old places that once ran the biggest races in the land, now buried under airports, housing estates, golf courses and student halls, remembered by a street name and the odd pub. This is the first of an occasional series on the best of them. Five to begin with, each with a whole story in it.

Why Britain’s racecourses vanished

The racing historian Chris Pitt called his book on the subject A Long Time Gone, and reckoned on “the ninety or so racecourses that have closed in Britain” across the twentieth century. Depending how you count a closure — a course that moved, a wartime shutdown that later reopened — the true figure runs from the high fifties to nearly a hundred. Either way, it’s a graveyard.

Read across the losses and the causes fall into two piles. In the first, the land simply became worth more as something else. An airport. A housing estate. A car park. Racing is a low-yield use of a lot of flat, well-drained, well-connected ground, and flat, well-drained, well-connected ground is exactly what a developer or a planning ministry wants too. That logic took Gatwick and Hurst Park.

In the second pile, the sport withdrew its own support. When betting shops were legalised in 1960, punters no longer had to go to the track to have a bet, and gate money — the thing that kept a marginal course alive — started to dry up. The Horserace Betting Levy Board, set up in 1961 to funnel a levy from bookmakers back into racing, also decided which courses were worth funding. When it said no, a course died. That, plus a Jockey Club increasingly unwilling to renew a licence on a dangerous track, closed Lincoln and Alexandra Park.

Almost all of it happened fast. Three of the five below shut inside a single decade. Here’s how they went.

Gatwick — the Grand National that went to war

Surrey

Gatwick opened in 1891, on land beside the London-to-Brighton railway with its own station and sidings for the horseboxes. It was no country gaff. By 1900 it was rated in the same breath as Ascot — the grandstands were called some of the finest in the kingdom, the paddock the best in the country — and up to twenty-six extra trains a day ran down from London on the big days.

Then came the war that made it famous. When the First World War took hold, the War Office requisitioned Aintree, and the Grand National had nowhere to go. So for three years a substitute was run at Gatwick, rebuilt to the National’s precise trip and fence count — though on a smaller, right-handed circuit, which made it a very different examination from Aintree’s great left-handed sweep.

Vermouth won the first, in 1916. In 1917, on heavy ground with snow blowing through, Ballymacad took it — and Ally Sloper, who’d won the actual 1915 Grand National at Aintree, could only finish third in the shadow race. The winning owner, Sir George Bullough, gave his prize money to a home for soldiers blinded in the trenches. And in 1918 came Poethlyn, ridden by Ernest Piggott — who, when the real thing returned to Aintree in 1919, won that too, at 11/4, the shortest-priced National winner of his day.

Racing carried on at Gatwick until the middle of 1940, the last meeting run as German troops marched into Paris, while the RAF was already requisitioning the land around the track. It never came back. By the 1950s it had been chosen as London’s second airport, and the course vanished under terminals and tarmac. Almost nothing survives — the Victorian bandstand was sold off for £60 and now, restored, stands in Crawley’s Memorial Gardens. There’s said to be a WH Smith in the airport sitting roughly where the winning post once was. You can decide for yourself whether that’s a fitting monument to a place once spoken of alongside Ascot.

Alexandra Park — the Frying Pan

North London

For over a century, London had its own racecourse, up on the hill beside Alexandra Palace. “Ally Pally” was a curiosity — a tight, pear-shaped loop that the racing men called the Frying Pan, where the runners went “round the frying pan and up the handle.” Only three trips were ever run there, the home straight was barely three furlongs, and the draw mattered enormously — which is to say it was exactly the kind of quirky, punishing little track that a sharp punter could learn and profit from.

It was ahead of its time in other ways. Regular evening meetings from 1955, often shown on the BBC — which had, after all, broadcast the world’s first regular high-definition television service from the Palace itself back in 1936, right beside the racecourse, which would outlive that novelty by a little over three decades.

The end, when it came, was about safety rather than money. In 1968 the Jockey Club refused to renew the licence — those tight bends were an accident waiting to happen — and Ally Pally limped on to a final meeting in September 1970, a hundred and two years after it opened, watched by just 2,749 people. A thin crowd for London’s own course.

The broadcaster John McCririck said that decades later, and asked that his ashes be scattered at the old furlong post. That’s the thing about a lost course — someone always loved it. The track’s outline still survives in the shape of the park, there’s a cricket club on the ground, and a pub called the Starting Gate keeps the name alive by the old start.

Lincoln — where the Flat season used to begin

Carholme, Lincolnshire

There was racing at Lincoln a very long time ago — James I is on record acting as clerk of the course in 1607, ordering a stretch roped off so the crowd could see. The proper course on the West Common dates from 1773, a long left-handed oval at Carholme, and for well over a century it did a job no course does now: it started the Flat season.

The Lincolnshire Handicap was the traditional curtain-raiser — the first big betting heat of the year. Paired with the Grand National a few weeks later, it made up the Spring Double, an ante-post bet that gripped the whole country every March: find the Lincoln winner and the National winner, months out, and collect a fortune. Only one jockey has ever landed both in the same year — Dave Dick, in 1956 — and it hasn’t been done since.

Lincoln’s death was pure Levy Board era. In 1964 the funding was withdrawn, and that was that. But the race didn’t die with the course. It moved up the road to Doncaster and became the Lincoln Handicap, and it still runs there today, still opening the turf season, still half of a Spring Double in punters’ heads even though its home has been gone sixty years. The common survives as public green space with the cathedral on the skyline, the listed 1897 grandstand still stands as a community hall, and there’s a golf course over the old track. Of the five, Lincoln got the gentlest end.

Hurst Park — the course the suffragettes burned

West Molesey, Surrey

Hurst Park sat on the Thames at Moulsey, and in its short life it gave the sport something that’s still with us. The Triumph Hurdle — now one of the showpiece races of the Cheltenham Festival, run every March in front of the world — was born here, first staged at Hurst Park in November 1939. It moved to Cheltenham only after the course closed. A Festival highlight, invented at a track that no longer exists.

But Hurst Park’s real place in the history books was written in fire. On the 8th of June 1913 — the very day Emily Davison died of the injuries she’d suffered stepping in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby four days earlier — two suffragettes, Kitty Marion and Clara Giveen, burned the grandstand to the ground in reprisal. The damage ran to somewhere between seven and ten thousand pounds. Both women were caught, sentenced to three years, went on hunger strike, and were released within days under the Cat and Mouse Act. It remains one of the most dramatic things ever to happen on a British racecourse, and it happened on one that’s now a housing estate.

The closure, in 1962, was the oldest story in the book: the ground was worth more with houses on it. The break-up was almost tidy. Mansfield Town bought one of the grandstands and re-erected it at their football ground; Ascot bought twenty acres of the turf for its new jumping course. Wates built the estate, but kept a stretch of riverside as a public park that still carries the name — and in the drought summer of 2018, the parched grass gave up a ghost, the outline of the old pre-parade ring surfacing in the lawn like a watermark.

Manchester — Lester Piggott’s last furlong at Castle Irwell

Castle Irwell, Salford

Salford had racing on and off for centuries, but the course that people mean by “Manchester Racecourse” — the one at Castle Irwell — opened in 1902 and was a serious, big-city track. It was home to the November Handicap, the traditional last big betting race of the Flat season, the mirror image of the Lincoln that opened it. In 1941, with Doncaster out of action for the war, Manchester even hosted the St Leger, one of the five Classics. It’s widely credited with staging the first evening meeting in England, in July 1951.

What killed it was almost embarrassing. The club built one of the first cantilevered concrete grandstands in Britain, with private boxes, at the start of the 1960s — and within a couple of years the thing was found riddled with rot. Rather than pay to fix it, the shareholders voted to sell up. The final meeting, in November 1963, was fittingly named the Goodbye Consolation Plate, and twenty thousand people came. It was won by Lester Piggott — closing, whether anyone in the crowd clocked it or not, the loop his grandfather had opened at Gatwick forty-five years before. The November Handicap, like the Lincoln, simply moved to Doncaster and carried on.

And the land? The University of Salford bought it and built a student village, which itself closed in 2015. Now it’s being turned into five hundred new homes by a developer called Salboy — whose co-founder, Fred Done, built Betfred into the biggest independent bookmaker in the country, and took his very first bets in a shop at Manchester Racecourse. The ground where he started is being built into houses by the company he owns. Racing gives, racing takes away.

What’s left

Five courses; five afterlives. An airport, a park, a common, a housing estate, and a housing estate all over again. Only the odd thing survives on the ground itself — a bandstand moved to a memorial garden, a pub by an old start, a listed grandstand hired out for functions, a shape in a drought-brown lawn.

But notice what doesn’t die. The Lincoln still opens the Flat season, at Doncaster. The November Handicap still closes it, at Doncaster. The Triumph Hurdle is a jewel of the Cheltenham Festival. Ally Sloper and Poethlyn are still in the record books. The races outlive the racecourses — they just run somewhere else now, at tracks that are very much alive.

That’s the thread we’ll follow through this series. There are plenty more where these came from — the Scottish Grand National’s old home at Bogside, Birmingham’s Bromford Bridge sold off for houses that were then named after racecourses, the London courses swallowed whole. We’ll get to them.

Frequently asked questions

Part one of an occasional series. Historical detail drawn from published racing and local histories; where sources disagree — a race title, a figure — we’ve said so rather than pick one.