British racing must fight to preserve the incredible variety of its racecourses

Questions about the fate of racecourses were not so urgent during the period we may come to call The First Lockdown and its aftermath, when it seemed to many that tracks were in a form of hibernation from which they would eventually emerge.

Now that racing faces a second period of the same length when tracks will be fully exposed to the winter cold, it looks much less likely all of them will survive.

After almost three decades without any racecourse closures, Towcester and Folkestone have gone in recent years and, for a time, so did Hereford and Great Leighs (now Chelmsford City) before they were brought back to life. If the last two examples give hope that closure might not be permanent, there is a larger body of evidence – poignantly illustrated in Chris Pitt’s book A Long Time Gone – that says racecourses are more easily lost than retrieved.