LEAK and blustery Newmarket in Suffolk with its distant, often sparse crowds, presents a challenge to television racing presenters trying to convey intimacy and atmosphere. Yet, for Turf purists, this is a revered location, the true home of the Flat, hosting some of the season’s most important staging points, from the early spring Classics to the prestigious end-of-season two-year-old races and historic handicaps. Newmarket Heath is also the setting for some of George Stubbs’s finest Thoroughbred paintings. In these, the big empty skies, and uncompromising flatness of the place, rather than being a negative, are an appealing part of the
