The Jockey Club, Cheltenham

The Jockey Club is the largest commercial group in British horseracing, with assets including Cheltenham, Aintree, Epsom Downs and Newmarket racecourses. Governed by Royal Charter, all profits are invested back into the UK’s second biggest spectator sport

The Jockey Club (JCR) owns 15 leading racecourses, including Aintree, home of the Cabbie’s Grand National; Cheltenham, stage for the prestigious Cheltenham Festival; Epsom Downs, home to the Investec Derby; and Newmarket’s Rowley Mile and July Course, considered Flat racing’s global HQ.

Integral Fire undertake the planned maintenance and reactive calls to all of the JCR properties with our dedicated BAFE accredited “in house “engineers who are available 24/7 365 days a year to ensure that all stakeholders can enjoy a day at the races in fire safe properties.

Located at its current site since 1898, The Cheltenham Racecourse is a Gloucestershire institution. Throughout the year it welcomes more than 700,000 visitors with numbers reaching their peak during Festival Week, culminating with the Betfred Cheltenham Gold Cup. Since 2003 more than £20m has been invested in a new enclosure and additional race day facilities with The Centaur, a new conference and events centre, at the heart of this redevelopment. Part of this investment has seen Integral rejuvenate the site’s fire detection equipment.

Tony Marsh, National Operations Manager at Integral UK, explains: “With the Grandstand suffering from on-going faults from its legacy detection equipment and Festival Week less than four months away, we were asked to refit the main Grandstand, function rooms and boxes. The system we implemented used Advance four loop panels with Apollo XP95 equipment. We work with Apollo products on a regular basis and chose the XP95 range because it is a robust, cost effective and easy to install suite of fire detection products, ideal for this type of environment.

The race course’s next major redevelopment includes the Weighing Room and Media Centre, requiring the detection system to be fully networked. As such, the panels installed have been future proofed to allow for this integration as the development continues.

As with any large venue it is important to minimise disruption from unwanted alarms on event days. Therefore, should any alarm be activated it goes to alert before ringing so the fire and security team at the Races can quickly ascertain if a full scale evacuation is needed.