The Jockey Club Venues gives event buyers one regional contact for its racecourses

The Jockey Club Venues has set up a regional business development team so that event buyers and agencies have one named contact for each group of its racecourses. It announced the change on 4 November 2026. The team covers the portfolio of 14 racecourse venues it sells for conferences, exhibitions, awards dinners and large events, including Aintree Racecourse and Exeter Racecourse, which are both in our directory. If you are planning an event at a racecourse, the practical change is that you can now brief one manager about a region and ask them to compare several courses, rather than contacting each venue’s sales office in turn.

Who covers which racecourse

Each business development manager now represents a defined region and group of venues. According to The Jockey Club Venues’ announcement, the split is:

• Jennifer Axford: Aintree and Haydock Park, in the North West.
• Andrew Rainbird: Epsom Downs, Kempton Park and Sandown Park, in and around London.
• Sophie Bowden: Cheltenham and Newmarket.
• Maria Gushchina: Warwick, Nottingham, Huntingdon and Market Rasen.
• Emma Bullas: national business development manager working with agents, as maternity cover.

The team is led by Kelly Englefield, group conference and events manager, and Katherine Hume, head of pro-active sales. The announcement says their focus is building relationships with corporate and agency buyers and helping them find the venues best suited to each event.

Three of the racecourses on the group’s own venue list, Carlisle, Exeter and Wincanton, are not named in any regional patch in the announcement. For those, the individual racecourse’s venue hire page and the central venues team remain the routes in. The central team’s published number is 01372 460326.

What the change means for event buyers

The point of the new structure is to start from the brief, not from a list of rooms. Katherine Hume said in the announcement that “buyers increasingly need more than a list of spaces and capacities”, and that rather than expecting a buyer to know which racecourse suits their brief, the managers “can help open up the portfolio and start with the event itself”.

In practice that suits two kinds of enquiry. The first is an event that could work in more than one place, such as a sales conference for a few hundred people somewhere near London, where Epsom Downs, Kempton Park and Sandown Park can now be compared by one person. The second is a recurring event that moves around the country, where an agency may want the same terms and the same contact across several courses. The national manager role for agents is aimed at that second case.

What the racecourses offer for conferences and events

The Jockey Club describes its portfolio as offering conference, gala dinner, exhibition and live-event space, with audio-visual services, catering, outdoor space and event management. Its venue pages give some of the headline figures. Cheltenham lists 2,600 m² of flexible indoor space and more than 360 acres outside. Haydock Park says it can host up to 20,000 attendees, with 1,000 m² of indoor exhibition space. Kempton Park, near the M3, has 400 acres of parkland and free parking.

The two courses in our directory show the range. Aintree, near Liverpool, seats up to 600 theatre style in each of its largest suites, has a 3,700 m² Equestrian Centre for larger shows and offers free parking for up to 1,800 cars, with full room details on our Aintree Racecourse profile. Exeter, on Haldon Hill, is a smaller venue, seating up to 300 theatre style across 17 meeting and event rooms, with more than 1,000 free parking spaces, as set out on our Exeter Racecourse profile.

You can compare these with other grounds on our stadium and sports venues page, or by city on the Liverpool and Exeter conference venue pages.

How we reported this

This is desk research. It is based on The Jockey Club Venues’ own announcement dated 4 November 2026 and its published venue list, which we read on 9 November 2026, with the trade report in Conference News used only to find the story. Venue figures come from each racecourse’s own pages and from our existing profiles, which are checked against the venues’ websites. We have not spoken to the team or visited the venues for this story.