in 2008 jim beavis published a history of fontwell park.

​Five years after writing a history of Brighton racecourse, Jim Beavis published a history of Fontwell Park. To my mind, without such racecourses our sport would be less diverse and less interesting. Both courses are idiosyncratic as you will not find a similar topography to Brighton on the flat or Fontwell Park over jumps anywhere else in Britain. Also, I have visited neither of them.
The History of Fontwell Park is the fourteenth book on British racecourses I have in my racing library, joining the now defunct Birmingham and Harpendon, and the still very much alive histories of Colwck Park or Nottingham to you and me, Epsom, Newbury, Market Rasen, Chepstow, Worcester (or Pitchcroft) Ascot, York and Salisbury. The latter published in 2019, also by Jim Beavis (Jim was really getting the hang of this writing game by then) being my favourite of the collection. I would advise readers to avoid the Newbury book as the course deserves a literary effort far more entertaining than the one provided by Mr. Osgood.
Fontwell’s claim to fame is that on 10th October 1949, The Queen as she was then or the Queen Mother as we came to know her, became the first Queen of England to win a horse race since Queen Anne in 1714 when Monaveen, starting at 30/100 favourite, won a 3-horse steeplechase. The horse was jointly owned by the Queen and Princess Elisabeth, our late lamented Queen.
The photographs in the book lends weight to the author’s claim of the charm of Fontwell, with the centre pages dedicated to ‘then and now’ photographs providing evidence that though no longer formal gardens the groundstaff have worked wonders to keep an essence of floriculture about the place.
Jim Beavis makes a very good fist of recording the founding of the course from training grounds to racecourse, though it made me wonder why there is not a race of importance at Fontwell these days as a memorial to its founder, Albert Day. Day trained at what is now known as Fontwell and was moderately successful and in want of a project, I suspect, to keep him busy during his retirement took the suggestion on board from his son-in-law, Meyrick Good, to construct a racecourse where once he trained his horses.
Beavis travels the road from private ownership to the racecourse being acquired by Northern Racing, from being a racecourse in straits not quite dire to the thriving course it is today, though it was 2008 when Beavis laid down his pen.
Idiosyncratic racecourses always throw-up specialists, with Certain Justice winning fourteen-race at Fontwell, closely followed by Stickler on twelve and St.Athan’s Lad eleven. And top-class horses have graced the racecourse with their presence, including Baracouda, Comedy of Errors, Crudwell, Hallowe’en, My Way De Solzen, National Spirit, Pendil, Salmon Spray, Stalbridge Colonist, Tingle Creek and What a Myth. And a good few others I might have mentioned, leaving them out only because anyone thirty-years younger than myself would doubtless not have heard of them.
Even when they are not riveting reading, I enjoy histories of British racecourses as they provide a great insight into how our sport has developed down the decades and in some cases centuries. I just hope that over the coming decades and centuries none of the present-day racecourses end-up as housing estates or business parks and recorded in books of the future along the lines of Chris Pitt’s wonderful ‘A Long Time Gone’, an extensive record of all the British racecourses lost to time and now only kept alive in the memories of the aged.