the thin end of the wedge.

​The two questions we must ask regarding the sad closure of Towcester racecourses are: was every avenue pursued in an attempt to keep the course open? And is there an under-the-table policy to allow other small courses go to the wall?
I may be wrong and others may know better but I have not read of any fighting talk by anyone to save Towcester. It is all very well the great and the good coming out after the demise of the racecourse and describing the situation as ‘sad’, ‘a tragedy’, ‘a sense of great disappointment’. It is all of those sentiments and more, of course. But as maddening as it is that the B.H.A. and racing’s stakeholders have allowed this unique little racecourse to close, with the exe hovering over Kempton Park, one of the country’s major racecourses, it has to asked if any racecourse is safe? Is the closure of Towcester just the thin end of the wedge? Is it the case that any one of Britain and Ireland’s racecourses will be allowed to perish?
There are wealthy people involved in our sport who are prepared to ‘invest’ millions in bloodstock and yet no member of ‘the great and the good club’ of British racing was prepared to organise or even float the idea of a consortium of wealthy investors to buy Towcester to keep it within the racing fold. Is it too late for a rescue mission? It seems that without the sanctioning of race-meetings, days in the calendar which appear to be a racecourse’s greatest asset, a racecourse doesn’t have the right to exist. Yet if the proposition to hold point-to-points in the future is genuine, surely the hallowed racing surface is to remain in situ, which begs the question as to why it is being said the course has closed rather than merely mothballed.
As Hereford and Chelmsford have proved, with the right amount of will-power, ambition and good management, racecourses can rise from the ashes stronger and with greater viability. Why can this not be the same with Towcester? Why has its owners and the racing community just rolled over and allowed the death notice to be served? There was always a lobby to reopen Hereford. And Fred Done and others had the vision to buy Great Leighs and invest in its future to great effect.
Horse racing, especially National Hunt, is a country sport. Its birth was because of two sporting gentleman betting on which of them could ride fastest between the two steeples of two country churches. Hence, steeple-chasing. The chase between two steeples. Nowadays the main racecourses are situation with urban environments but not that comparatively long ago a day at the races was a trip into the countryside, a day out of the dirt and grime of the city. Today, racecourses offer a green lung to our cities and towns. Towcester is ideally situated to be that trip to the country for sporting fun.
Because there is scant hope the B.H.A. will ever offer positive and innovative leadership, horse racing is ever in need of movers and shakers, entrepreneurs who recognise the potential of challenging bookmakers monopoly on the betting side of the sport. The B.H.A. plod along, much like the Jockey Club before them, getting excited when someone comes up with a stupid idea like ‘formula 1 style team racing’ as if the concept of ‘fans’ getting behind a team ‘borrowed’ for a few weeks by a washing powder manufacturer or gambling company could ever be the financial ‘saviour’ of the sport.
I suspect the company that own Towcester have never had any interest in the place as a racecourse. What is happening is what they had always planned to happen. Soon pockets of Towcester will be opened up for development. A few houses here, a business park there and this unique racecourse will be as dead as Wye, Woore, Lanark, Buckfastleigh and Folkestone; country courses that ultimately no one in racing cared about. Racecourses that in the main catered for the small trainer and his workaday owner. Remember, the B.H.A.’s predecessors, the Jockey Club, sat back and allowed Aintree to be taken to the brink of closure. It took the passion of racing enthusiasts and the public to understand the true place Aintree held in both racing and the history of sport in this country.
Losing Towcester is profoundly regrettable, an annoying example of how little racing’s custodians and regulators care about the backbone and journeyman of the sport, but if the trend continues what this latest course closure assures us is it will not be the last. Take note, houses surround nearly all of our best racecourses from Ayr to Cheltenham, with hotels taking root by design in many others, encroaching like an epidemic on the green sward of the sporting field. In time we might think ourselves fortunate if we come across a Racecourse Road, Steeplechase Avenue, or Grandstand Street. Evidence of what used to be.