Riding across Newmarket Heath on some shiny specimen of thoroughbred perfection I often thought to myself, ‘I must be the luckiest anthropologist ever.’ Studying horseracing enabled me to fulfil a number of ambitions, including riding racehorses, taking a yearling through the sales ring, seeing a thoroughbred foal born and, ultimately, leading up a winner at Newmarket's July Course. My relationship with my informants in Newmarket was influenced by the passion for horses that I shared with most of them, to the extent that no study would have been possible without it.

Newmarket is a town of seventeen thousand people and four thousand racehorses (Newmarket Tourist Information Centre 2002). It is located on the Suffolk–Cambridgeshire border, and its windswept Heath has been the site of horseracing in a multitude of forms, from the scythed chariots of Boadicea to the massive finances and internationalism of flat racing today. It is often assumed that the history of Newmarket is the history of horseracing. It is occasionally stated that Newmarket is horseracing.

Newmarket epitomises English racing. It is not typical of, nor entirely different from, other racecourse towns and cities. What makes Newmarket interesting is that it was the site of the codification of horseracing in the eighteenth century, and became the favoured location for the most powerful opinion-makers in horseracing society at that time. Newmarket still accommodates the Jockey Club Rooms.