ROYAL ASCOT came back home yesterday to a less-than-enthusiastic reception as confusion and congestion reigned around the racecourse’s new £200 million stand.
Construction work on the stand forced the premier racing event in the social calendar to decamp to York last year. Old Ascot hands, seeing the new stand for the first time yesterday, were unimpressed, the principal comparison being with an airport.
“It’s Ascot, and the Queen’s here, but this is not Royal Ascot. You might as well be at Aintree or even Stansted,” one disorientated regular from Hertfordshire said. “And I can’t find my husband; we always knew where to meet in the old days.”
The new stand, with its 24 escalators and seven restaurants, created chaos. Top-hatted race-goers struggling through overcrowded walkways were reduced to asking The Times if it had the faintest idea where the Royal Enclosure was. Fortunately it did.
Colin Sheppard, 70, from Chichester, West Sussex, did not like the stand. “I can’t stand the architecture. It looks like Munich airport — and I don’t like Munich airport.”
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Ascot’s redevelopment was intended to bring the punters closer to the horse flesh but even Douglas Erskine-Crum, the course’s chief executive, has admitted that imperfections remain, and that the views from the stand seats, the Steppings and the Lawns need improvement.
The lawn in front of the new stand, for example, has a slight upward slope towards the track. Only spectators right on the rails are able to see much.
It is, of course, all right for the Queen, who yesterday enjoyed a perfect view from the new Royal Box at first floor level in the stand. Semi-circular and entirely glassed-in, it looks like a blue space capsule. Around her are 265 other private boxes; Ascot, like so many other big sporting venues, has gone headlong down the road of corporate hospitality.
Royalty has been coming to Ascot since Queen Anne instituted the first meeting in 1711, and they know the dress code by now. The Queen, who officially opened the stand at a brief ceremony in the new Parade Ring, wore a Karl Ludwig outfit of a royal blue crèpe coat with a silk and satin multicoloured print dress and a Philip Somerville royal blue hat with a pink band and jaunty bow.
The Duchess of Cornwall wore a gold coat and a cream hat with a brim the size of a flying saucer to which she clung determinedly in the teeth of a sprightly breeze. Men are often left wondering why women wear such wind-catching headgear.
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As the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke of York, the Earl and Countess of Wessex and the Princess Royal formed a strong royal contingent riding down the new Straight Mile in four State landaus, the band of the Scots Guards played an eclectic selection, including the theme to Indiana Jones and Darth Vader’s Death March from Star Wars.
The Queen made a brief speech opening the new stand but her words were distorted by a truly atrocious sound system. For the record, what she said was: “I have pleasure in declaring the new Ascot open.”
Tracy Rose, 45, a milliner, was wearing one of her own elaborate creations in crèpe and blue silk which took her three weeks to make. She struggled valiantly to explain the design: “It’s fairly abstract, really. Sort of a rose tree. Kind of a cloud, I suppose.”
Mrs Rose was at York last year. “I loved it up there. It was totally different but the Yorkshire women were just as stylish as the Londoners who come to Ascot.”
Ascot’s traditional dress code faced a dilemma yesterday; would race-goers be allowed to carry England flags, given a rival sporting event later in the day? It was a fine point and at least one woman carrying the flag of St George was politely asked to put it away.
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If they were not banned, they were certainly discouraged. “It’s a question of decorum,” an Ascot spokeswoman said. “We want to preserve the essence of the event. Royal Ascot is definitely about patriotism, but perhaps about celebrating it in a different way. However, we expect lots of patriotic hats on Ladies’ Day.”
Maryanne Clark, 33, was not waving a flag, but everything else about her shouted that she would not be rooting for Sweden later in the day. She wore an England dress, England earrings, her finger and toenails were painted red and white and her arm bore an England tattoo. She was allowed in.
“It took me most of last night to make the dress,” Ms Clark said. “Why isn’t everyone here in England stuff?” She would not be staying for the last race; there was something she just had to watch on television.
ODDS-ON WINNER