Tim Cox, Trustee of the Home of Horseracing Trust and the National Horseracing Museum,reveals plans for Newmarket’s new National Heritage Centre.
In Gallery 4 of the National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket is a red wooden post standing about four feet high. It is not much to look at, having been out in all weathers for many years. It still retains parts of the metal plates and bolts that were early attempts to protect and preserve it.
This is probably the oldest physical object to represent the close link between horseracing and betting since the seventeenth century. It is what is left of the Red Betting Post that stood on Newmarket Heath and around which punters gathered to bet with each other, and eventually with bookmakers.
This is one item that will be displayed prominently in the new Museum that is being planned.
On July 9, 2013, Peter Jensen, chairman of the Home of Horseracing Trust, announced that the Trust had raised £15 million. This is the capital required to convert the five-acre Palace House and Stables site in the centre of Newmarket into the National Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art.
It’s taken eight years to get the dream to this point. We have now reached the end of the beginning.
Three charities have combined to execute this ambitious plan: the National Horseracing Museum (NHRM), British Sporting Art Trust (BSAT) and Retraining of Racehorses charity (ROR). These three charities are ideally suited to exploit the three distinct elements of the new site under a single management team led by Chris Garibaldi, the present director of the National Horseracing Museum.
The museum will move from its present home next to the Jockey Club to the redeveloped Trainer’s House and King’s Yard Stables. This yard has been empty since Bruce Hobbs gave up training in 1985.
It has had a long association with racing going back to the days of Charles II. A recent archaeological dig by Channel 4’s Time Team uncovered the foundations of the earliest stables. Further work has uncovered the back wall of those stables and this will be exposed as the spine wall of the new museum. There will be galleries in the Trainer’s House and in the stables, which will be protected by a covered walkway.
The second element will be the conversion of Palace House itself into the Fred Packard Museum and Gallery of British Sporting Art. The finest examples of sporting art will be on display. Pictures will be drawn from the collections of the BSAT and the Tate Gallery and augmented by loans from private and public collections.
Charles II originally built the Palace at Newmarket as a sporting retreat. Palace House represents about a fifth of the original building. It is a neat circle that will be completed when sporting art returns to be displayed in a proper domestic setting of a sporting palace.
The third element means the return of racehorses to the stables. The Rothschild Yard at the back of the property will be used to showcase the work of the Retraining of Racehorses charity. Visitors will have the chance to see retired heroes up close and see the work of the charity in a specially designed arena in the 4-acre paddock. This is an important element in the whole project. Too many visitors come to Newmarket as the Home of Horseracing and do not have the chance to see a live horse, unless they go up to the racecourse on a race day.
The building contractors will take over the site this autumn and will finish their work by late summer 2015.
For the curators at the museum, the work has only just started and has a long way to go. The challenge is to tell the story of horseracing in an exciting and innovative way. This will involve the display of items taken from the collection of over 8,000 objects and the use of new technologies to bring that history alive for the visitors of the twenty-first century.
So what are the challenges?
The first is the delicate balance between selection of objects, space (never as much as we want) and cost (never as unlimited as we would like).
We do have the Red Post, much of the paraphernalia of racecourse bookmakers (hods, badges, boards and tickets) and early machines from the Tote and betting shops. The National Sporting League Benevolent Fund has sponsored the current gallery in memory of Charles Layfield. We are always on the look-out for items that will enhance the story that we are trying to tell.
But in a modern museum we cannot just put the objects in a case and leave them on the display for a few years. We have to take on a wider responsibility.
The second challenge is to recognise the wide range of audiences that we must attract to the museum on behalf of our public and private funders. The easy bit will be the professionals and hard-core racing fans.
For the Heritage Lottery Fund we must encourage the community involvement in the preservation of our heritage.
Last year the primary school that is our next-door neighbour put on a play with the help of a local theatre company using words from one of our research projects. We had talked to the lads who used to work in the yard and recorded what life was like in the post-war years. Some of the lads had tears in their eyes as they listened to their own words coming back to them from the mouths of their grandchildren.
For the Wellcome Foundation we have to use horseracing to show how science has developed and improved the sport. The obvious topics will be in such areas as racehorse physiology, veterinary care, racehorse identification to eliminate the running of ringers and weight maintenance for jockeys. But we are keen to use the science of bookmaking to help schoolchildren understand the mathematics of chance and the assessment of risk.
Wouldn’t it be good if we could help the readers of the Daily Mail to understand and interpret the real health risks and possible cures that are being discussed almost every day? Nor will we shy away from pointing out the dangers of excessive gambling,
For Suffolk County Council and Forest Heath District Council we will put the National Heritage Centre at the heart of the tourist trade to help the regeneration of the town by attracting visitors.
And for the racing industry we will use the past to encourage people to go racing today. We will help the next generation of racegoers to understand the mysteries of the racecourse and unlock its jargon.
One of our working themes is to ‘Make Every Day a Race Day’. We want to capture the excitement of the racecourse – the sounds, the colour, the people, and the tension – that makes a day at the races so enjoyable.
And it all has to be done to a tight timetable. We hope to welcome our first visitors before the spring of 2016.
17th Century red betting post
Red Betting Post as it looks today
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