Lewes Racecourse

You might think Lewes gets crowded on Bonfire Night, but apparently that’s nothing compared to how rammed the town used to get when the races were on. Until the 1960s, one of the biggest racecourses in Britain was up on the Downs above the Nevill estate. Crowds would arrive at the station and a procession of people, carts and eventually cars and buses would wend its way through the town up to what’s now known as ‘the gallops’ at Cuckoo Bottom.

Chris Collison is old enough to have been to the races before they closed for good, but not old enough to remember them. ‘When I was two years old, my mum took me up there in my pushchair,’ he says. His mum’s passion rubbed off, and Chris is now a font of knowledge about Lewes races. ‘It started in the 1700s, and in its day it was supposed to have been one of the grandest courses, and it attracted everyone from wealthy landowners to petty criminals. The Prince Regent even came up from Brighton.’

The races were a big part of Lewes’ economy, from the rent stable boys paid for their lodgings, to the jodhpur makers, farriers, saddle makers, blacksmiths, hay makers and feed merchants, not to mention the bookies, taxi drivers and tipsters who cashed in on race days. With so much money around, it was inevitable that the criminal element would muscle in. ‘There were two gangs called the Sabinis and Massinis. The razor gangs were a feature of life at every racecourse, but in Sussex they became notorious because of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. There’s a scene in the film version where a man gets his face cut at Brighton race track, but it’s actually based on an incident at Lewes.’