Newmarket has a unique historic position as the acknowledged home of horseracing. Yet until now no book has provided a definitive history of Newmarket Heath, the key figures who contributed to its transformation from an untamed wilderness to the world's finest racing ground, and the origins and development of the Jockey Club. This comprehensive and authoritative book is the first to trace this history from its early beginnings to the present day and to show how and why the sport of horseracing developed on the heath and spread globally from that base. All of the turf's greatest racehorses and the larger-than-life characters integral to the heath's history are included, while a great wealth of paintings and prints (which provide the only visual evidence of how racing was conducted and what Newmarket looked like) are illustrated and analysed.

Author Biography

David Oldrey is a former Deputy Senior Steward of the Jockey Club and a historian of horseracing and its art. He is author of the Jockey Club rooms, a Catalogue and History of the Collection and the Halifax Collection of sporting art. Timothy Cox is a historian of the thoroughbred with an extensive library. He owns and operates The Cox Library, a free online bibliography of works on the thoroughbred horse. Richard Nash is a Professor of English at Indiana University. He is the author of a prize-winning book, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (University Press of Virginia, 2003) and many essays on eighteenth-century British literature and culture. He is currently at work on a book on the origins of thoroughbred horse racing, and his horses race under the nom de course of Byerly Bloodstock LLC.