Guide prices
What a riding arena actually costs.
An arena is a considered purchase in the tens of thousands of pounds, and you are entitled to know roughly what you are getting into before you invite anyone onto your land. So here it is, costed by Lewis rather than estimated.
By size
The 20m × 40m is costed directly. That works out at £47.50 to £52.50 per square metre, and the larger sizes are scaled from it rather than guessed. A site visit turns any of them into a real number.
Guide price
20m × 40m outdoor arena
£38,000
typically to £42,000, excluding VAT
The standard British arena and the right size for most private yards. Big enough for a full dressage test, general schooling and a course of fences.
Included
- Site strip, cut and fill to level on reasonable ground
- Perimeter and lateral drainage connected to a designed outfall
- Compacted stone sub-base with geotextile membrane
- Silica sand and fibre riding surface, laid and levelled
- Post and rail perimeter fence with a single gate
- Site clearance and reinstatement on completion
Guide price
20m × 60m outdoor arena
£57,000
typically to £63,000, excluding VAT
Scaled from the 20m × 40m rate. Confirmed on a site visit.
The full international dressage size. Half as much again in ground, drainage and surface, so the cost difference is real rather than cosmetic.
Included
- Everything in the 20m × 40m specification, at 60m length
- Additional lateral drainage runs across the extra span
- Proportionally larger stone and surface volumes
Guide price
Refurbishment and resurfacing
Enquire
Priced from a site visit
An existing arena that has stopped riding well. Sometimes it needs a top up, sometimes the surface is finished, and sometimes the real problem is underneath.
Included
- Survey of the existing sub-base and drainage before anything is quoted
- Removal and disposal of spent surface where required
- New surface supplied, laid and levelled
- Drainage jetting or replacement where it is the actual fault
Price your own arena
Six questions, and a real band at the end of them rather than a form that promises somebody will be in touch. It uses the same rate per square metre as the table above, which comes from a costed job rather than a guess.
£38,000 to £42,000
800 m², excluding VAT
This is the build, not a quote. What it cannot know is your ground, and on this job the ground decides more of the final figure than the size does. That is what the site visit is for, and it costs you nothing.
Book a site visitWhat the figure covers
A price is only worth reading if you know what sits inside it. This is the standard specification, and the short list of things no band can honestly promise before anyone has walked your field.
Included
- Excavating and grading the formation to fall, so the water has somewhere to go before anything is built on it.
- The drainage system, designed for your ground rather than dropped in to a standard detail.
- A compacted stone sub-base, laid and consolidated in layers.
- A geotextile separator membrane specified to your ground, so the sub-base and the surface cannot migrate into each other.
- The riding surface: silica sand and fibre as standard.
- Post and rail fencing.
- The three stage sign-off, photographed and dimensioned at each stage before it is covered.
- The final report showing where the whole drainage system is installed, and a care plan written for the surface you own.
Not included
- VAT.
- Ground that is not what a survey would reasonably expect: rock, made ground, a spring, or a formation that cannot be worked in the season we are building.
- Getting plant to the arena where a lorry cannot already reach it.
- Planning fees, and any planning work beyond telling you honestly whether you need permission.
- Anything beyond the standard specification. A waxed surface, floodlighting, fencing other than post and rail, gates and mirrors are all priced at survey.
None of the exclusions are there to leave room to come back to you with a bigger number. They are the four things a survey exists to find, and you will hear about any of them before you are committed to anything.
Cut and fill is what moves the number
Almost every arena needs the ground levelled before anything is built on it, and on a sloping site that means cutting into the high side and filling the low one. It is the longest part of the job and the part that varies most between one field and the next.
| Cut and fill | Time on site | Typically |
|---|---|---|
| 500mm cut, 500mm fill | 5 to 6 days | A gentle fall across the site. |
| 1m cut, 1m fill | 10 to 12 days | A pronounced slope. Weather permitting. |
That is why we survey on foot before quoting, and why two arenas of identical size on neighbouring farms can differ by thousands. The size of the arena is the easy part of the estimate. The ground is not.
Start to finish
Approximately 4 to 6 weeks on site
Depending on ground conditions and on the cut and fill. Weather moves it: we do not dig a clay site in the middle of a wet winter if it can be avoided, because the result is worse and it costs more.
What a web page cannot tell you
- Ground conditions decide more of the final figure than the size of the arena does.
- Every band above assumes a site a lorry can reach and ground that is workable in the season we are building.
- None of these figures include VAT.
- A site visit is the only way to turn a band into a number, and it costs you nothing.
Guide prices are exactly that. They exist so you can decide whether to have the conversation, which is the thing a website should tell you and the thing this industry refuses to.