Off to the races - at Bromford Bridge in Birmingham
Jan 22 2010 By Chris Upton
Horse racing was once commonplace in Birmingham, writes Chris Upton.
On June 21 1965, in pouring rain, a horse called Plantation Inn trundled in last in a five-furlong race. It was just after 9.30pm. There would not, in normal circumstances, be anything meritorious in bringing up the rear in a horse race.
But for the horse concerned, an unimpressive nag at the best of times, there was a place in the history books, even if his prospects of a happy retirement in Dubai were receding.
For Plantation Inn was the last horse to finish the last race at Bromford Bridge, Birmingham’s premier racecourse. His less-than-impressive showing brought down the curtain on exactly 70 years of racing at Bromford. Within weeks the diggers would be arriving (at about the same speed) to turn the old racetrack into a housing estate.
Birmingham thus went a little way towards solving its housing crisis, and at the same time waved goodbye to one of its great sporting arenas.
It’s no accident that none of our major cities - with the notable exception of Liverpool - can today boast a racetrack. A mixture of poor weather and poor attendances in the 1960s, the legalisation of betting shops in 1961, together with an insatiable appetite for real estate, put paid to many in these years. Only in smaller towns was the population pressure lower, and the chances of survival higher.
That final race in 1965 - the Farewell Maiden Plate - put paid to more than two centuries of horse-racing in the second city.
The earliest recorded horse-race in Birmingham, according to Chris Pitt and Chas Hammond, took place in May 1747. No doubt there were earlier outings, but the local newspaper - Aris’s Gazette - only began printing in 1741.
Sadly we know not where that first race was run.
Entries, says the Gazette, were to be registered at the Swan Inn on Snow Hill, but is silent as to the venue of the race. The prospect of horses galloping anywhere near Snow Hill today is a terrifying one, but not so unlikely in the mid-18th century. Snow Hill marked the edge of town, and anywhere beyond that was fair game for a horse-race.
They once raced at Smethwick, at Handsworth, at Sparkbrook and even at Deritend.
Land was rented for day, posts hammered into the ground to mark the start and finish, and away they went. At many venues the horses raced once, never to return, but in Hall Green - towards the end of the 19th century - they ran for almost 30 years, and crowds of up to 30,000 turned out, especially for “Nailcasters Derby Day”, an industrial take on the more up-market occasion at Epsom. But as the city of Birmingham spread ever outwards, the open ground needed to race horses dwindled.
By the late 19th century, the racing industry had become thoroughly professional. It was in 1894 that two brothers - John and Stanley Ford - with the backing of a company headed by the Earl of Aylesford, took out a lease on 42 acres of meadowland at Bromford Bridge.
