News

On a clear day, Richmond’s old racecourse feels like the top of the world. You can pick out the Kilburn White Horse on the North York Moors, the cooling towers of Teesside on the North Sea coast and, if your eyes or your imagination are up to it, even the towers of York Minster.

Yet the racecourse itself remains a semi-secret, shared mainly between locals and their dogs. Few visitors make it up to these windy heights. It’s their loss.

In Georgian times this was a glittering venue, drawing big crowds and big money. Then the new, faster thoroughbred horses arrived and the tight bends on the Richmond course suddenly looked lethal. The racing shifted to safer tracks at Thirsk and Catterick, leaving the grandstand at Richmond, designed by star architect John Carr of York, to face an uncertain future.

The years have not been kind. Rabbits have burrowed under it, weather has stripped and battered it, brambles and ivy have wrapped themselves around collapsing stone. Even so, its shape still reads clearly in the landscape, prompting the same question from almost everyone who sees it: why can’t it be restored?

Today, it turns out, it can. More than £400,000 in Government funding has been secured by Historic England and the site’s owners, the Burgage Pastures Committee. The plan is not to rebuild it as new, but to stabilise the old stand so that visitors can once again get close to it, and safely enjoy one of Richmond’s most remarkable places.

You can learn more from an excellent book, A Short History of Richmond Racecourse and its Grandstand - £5.00 from Richmond Information Centre, while stocks last.