'My wife wants to know why I'm reading the sales catalogue in bed - it's relentless, but you have to be on it all the time'

The epicentre of British jump racing seems to find itself changing at a similar rate to prime ministers and socks.

Some of us remember when it was Lambourn, where, with Nicky Henderson still in short trousers, Fred Winter and Fulke Walwyn tilted at each other from two sides of the same wall, then had to tilt at the upstart Michael Dickinson as he jeered from the upstairs window of the emergent northern powerhouse.

For a good few years it moved west, to the Somerset stronghold whence Martin Pipe and Paul Nicholls annexed 29 trainers' titles. The Cotswolds has had a say in matters of late, but if you're looking for the next hotbed of National Hunt, you could do worse than look towards Warwickshire, where in an area within a stone's throw of Stratford, not famous for anything much since Shakespeare was a lad, two yards barely six miles apart are emerging as notable features on the South Midlands Ordnance Survey.