Handyman Newmarket

Newmarket has been associated with horseracing since at least 1605, when James I noticed the broad, level chalk turf of the Heath and began holding race meetings there. Charles II was an even more enthusiastic patron and effectively moved his court here for parts of each year, building a small palace on the High Street. The town has been the unofficial capital of British horseracing ever since. The Jockey Club, founded around 1750, still has its headquarters in the Rooms on the High Street, and the National Horseracing Museum tells the long story in considerable detail.

Two racecourses — the Rowley Mile and the July Course — sit on the heath either side of town. There are around fifty training yards in and around Newmarket, more than 2,500 horses in training at any given time and around 70 stud farms in the surrounding countryside. The whole calendar of the town turns on the racing year. Tattersalls, the great bloodstock auctioneers, have their sale rings off the high street and stage the world's most important yearling sales each autumn. The historic core of the town is small but full of fine eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, and the surrounding parishes are ringed with trainers' cottages and high brick walls of stud farms. Properties here vary from Georgian townhouses to estate cottages, and equestrian buildings always need maintenance, which keeps me coming over the Heath regularly.