Two halves of the same job.

Why we publish prices

Before starting this we checked the two best known arena companies in the region, page by page. Fifty one pages between them. Not one carries a price, a range or a starting figure. One of them describes an arena as a big investment and then never says what the investment is. Lewis has worked in this trade his whole life and has never known it to be otherwise.

We think that is the wrong way round. An arena costs tens of thousands of pounds. You should be able to find out roughly what you are getting into before you invite anyone onto your land, without having to sit through a sales visit to get a number.

So our guide prices are on the site, itemised, with the things that move them stated plainly. It means competitors can read them. It also means the people who call us have already decided the numbers work, which is better for everybody.

Why the pairing is the point

A contractor who does not ride builds to a drawing, correctly, and hands over something that measures right. A rider who does not build has strong opinions and no drainage design. Both halves hold real knowledge and in this industry they almost never meet.

Harriet Smith has competed as a showjumper for thirty years and ridden hundreds of arenas she had no part in building, indoor and outdoor, in every month of the year. Some were excellent and some were genuinely dangerous, and the difference was legible from the saddle within a circuit. A builder cannot accumulate that, however good they are: they know their own arenas intimately and encounter everyone else's only when something has gone wrong.

Lewis Gill has been around arena construction since boyhood and has never done anything else. Fourteen years of it were spent learning the craft under Mark Scott Arenas, and he went on to co-found Chart Arenas. Most firms building arenas are groundworks contractors for whom an arena is one of the things they do. Lewis has studied one thing for his whole working life.

He is doing this now to build arenas for people who want the best quality at a reasonable cost, rather than to undercut anybody. Competing on price in this trade means saving money where it cannot be seen, and the place it is always saved is underneath. As he puts it: our arenas hide nothing under the surface.

So the specification here is chosen from a conversation about what you actually ride. The rider's questions get asked during the build, when they still cost nothing to answer. And at handover the arena is ridden rather than inspected, which produces a snagging list about how it rides instead of how it was built.

We are not claiming other builders do bad work. We are claiming that a surface is judged by feel, that feel is only available through a horse, and that we are the only arena builder in this market with a rider inside the build rather than standing on the other side of it. The longer argument is here.

Why we lead with drainage

Every arena builder talks about surfaces, because surfaces are visible and photograph well. Drainage is invisible, it is a large share of the cost, and it is the part that decides whether you are still happy in ten years.

It is also the easiest place to save money on a quote without the customer ever knowing. Once the surface is laid, most of that work disappears. Which is precisely why we believe it should be correctly specified, documented, and never treated as the place to compromise.

What we will tell you

That your arena needs a top up rather than the resurface you were expecting. That the problem is the drainage and a new surface would be money set on fire. That the spot you have in mind is at the bottom of a slope. That we think permission is unlikely on your site, before you have spent anything.

Some of those conversations cost us work. They are the reason to use us.