Courses for horses

With the Cheltenham Festival been and gone, all eyes are on Aintree and the Grand National. These courses feature in Tom Peacock’s Remarkable Racecourses, as do other familiar names: Ascot, Epsom, Goodwood, Chantilly and so on. But this isn’t simply a rundown of the most famous racecourses in the world. It’s more a whistle-stop, round-the-world tour of racetracks that are a bit different.

What’s striking is just how much a racecourse can tell you about the culture and politics of a place. Politics does occasionally come into racing — after all, the most famous of all the suffragettes’ protests happened on a racecourse. We learn that in Beirut, the racecourse was the only place during the Lebanese civil war where residents could ‘mix freely’, arriving through separate entrances. With gambling illegal in mainland China, Happy Valley racecourse in Hong Kong sees many punters coming for a flutter, and the state monopolised tote can see nearly £100 million staked per meeting.