Horses Smith × Lewis Gill
Engineered by a master of arenas. Judged from the saddle.
A lifetime of arena construction on one side. Thirty years of competitive showjumping on the other. The formation, the drainage and the sub-base are engineered to the ground they sit on. The depth, the grip and the way it gives back are settled by a horse. Almost every arena in this country is built with only one of those.
And we publish what it costs, which nobody else in this trade will.
What we do
Every service has its own page, written properly, because a single page that mentions everything tells you nothing about any of it.
Arena construction
New arenas built from the ground up, drainage first.
Read more →Arena refurbishment and resurfacing
Arenas that have stopped riding well, diagnosed before they are quoted.
Read more →Arena surfaces
Silica sand, fibre, wax and rubber, compared honestly rather than sold.
Read more →Arena drainage
The part nobody sees and the reason most arenas fail.
Read more →Arena maintenance
Levelling, top ups and service plans that keep a surface where it should be.
Read more →Arena and paddock fencing
Post and rail built to be ridden alongside, not to a catalogue.
Read more →Lunge pens and all weather turnout
Round pens and turnout that stays usable in February.
Read more →
The part nobody photographs
When an arena fails, it is almost never the surface that failed.
It is that water was never given anywhere to go. Drainage is invisible, it is a large share of the cost, and it is the easiest place for a contractor to save money on a quote without you ever knowing until the third wet winter.
We would rather over specify it and be plain about what that costs.
How we design drainage →The difference
Most arena builders do not ride.
They know surfaces, they know the terminology and they know what a good one looks like. What they cannot know is what one feels like through the body of a horse, because that does not arrive through your eyes or a spec sheet. It arrives through the saddle.
A surface fifteen millimetres too deep measures correctly and rides badly. A horse that starts backing off a fence it was jumping happily a fortnight ago is filing a surface report. Neither of those reaches a contractor who has never sat on one.
Harriet Smith has competed as a showjumper for 30 years and ridden hundreds of arenas she had no part in building. A contractor knows their own arenas and meets everyone else's only when something has gone wrong. That is a different kind of experience, and it is the one this partnership adds.
Master of Arenas
Lewis Gill
A lifetime in arena construction, learning the craft from boyhood and fourteen years of it under Mark Scott Arenas, then co-founder of Chart Arenas. Most firms building arenas are groundworkers who also take arena work. This is the other thing entirely.
The Rider
Harriet Smith
A working showjumping yard breeding and producing horses for international sport. We ride on our own surfaces every day of the year, in February as well as July, so we know what a surface does to a horse over a season rather than how it looks on the day it is finished.
Every arena we build gets ridden before we call it finished.
Not walked, not measured. Ridden, in both directions and over a fence where that is what it is for. What comes out of it is a snagging list about how it rides rather than how it was built, and that is the part no other builder in this market offers.
The Rider and the Master of Arenas →
Craftsmanship in the detail
Nobody photographs a corner. We build it as though somebody will.
Boards mitred flush at the corner, faces to the riding side, ends cut clean. There is nothing here for a stirrup, a boot or a rug to catch on, and nothing standing proud that a horse could find at speed.
It takes longer than butting two boards together and screwing a batten across the back. It is also the difference between a fence that looks right for twenty years and one that looks like it was finished in a hurry.
Sign-off and handover
Nothing gets covered until you have seen it.
An arena is buried infrastructure. A week after the surface goes down, everything that decides whether it works is invisible. So the build runs as three client sign-offs, each photographed and dimensioned before the next layer goes over the top.
- 1
Sub-base and drainage
The topsoil is off, the formation is cut to its designed falls, and the drainage is in: perimeter interceptor, laterals at their designed centres, the carrier drain, and the outfall connected and proven to run.
- 2
Base and drainage
The stone sub-base is built up and compacted in layers, drainage connections are made good through it, and the geotextile membrane is laid.
- 3
Surface
The riding surface is supplied, laid, spread and levelled to its specified depth, then left to settle before it is ridden.
You keep a dimensioned plan of every drainage run, connection and rodding point, measured from fixed points that will still be there in twenty years, plus a care plan written for the surface you actually own.
What you get at the end →Where we build
Ground conditions and planning policy genuinely differ county by county, so each has its own page rather than a list of names.