The Newcastle Jockey Club runs Broadmeadow racecourse, a venue that combines fast-moving animals, large race-day crowds and open outdoor space. Fencing at a site like this is not decoration. It separates public viewing zones from the active racing area, creates holding areas and movement corridors for horses, marks out restricted entry paths for staff, race officials and emergency teams, and keeps the perimeter secure around stables and storage.
We worked on the fencing for a construction project at the Jockey Club, supplying and installing across the site. The kind of fencing a racecourse needs varies by where it sits: chainwire along spectator edges, steel mesh gates for staff access, defined corridors for horse movement, and boundary fencing along perimeter roads and public walkways. Each run has to reduce interference and stand up to repeated use without limiting the visibility and movement a race day depends on.
What the job involved
Racecourse fencing takes a beating. It has to hold up to weather, high foot traffic, animal contact, and the setup and pack-down around events. To handle that, the work used galvanised mesh and secure post setups, with posts set into concrete, mesh tensioned to stop it sagging, and finishes applied to slow corrosion.
The part worth noting is what happened when the brief changed. On a live construction program, scope increases are where quality usually slips. On this one it did not. In the client's own words:
Chainwire Fencing are incredibly easy to deal with from pricing to supply and install. Chainwire had a large amount of scope increase on the project and programme and quality was well maintained. We would definitely look at utilising Chainwire Fencing on our upcoming projects.
Rhys Maybury, Project Engineer, Richard Crookes Constructions
That is the measure of a fencing contractor on a moving job: the fence still gets built right when the goalposts shift.