Arena refurbishment and resurfacing

Three different problems that look identical

An arena that rides badly presents the same way whatever is wrong with it. Deep patches, a hard band down the track, standing water after rain, a surface that has gone dead. Owners are usually told they need resurfacing. Sometimes that is true and often it is not.

• The surface is genuinely spent. Fibre breaks down and sand rounds off with use. After ten or fifteen years a surface stops holding together and no amount of harrowing brings it back.
• There is not enough surface left. Material migrates, gets carried out on hooves and blows away. What is left is too thin, which is why it feels hard, and the fix is a top up rather than a replacement.
• The base or the drainage has failed. The surface is fine. Water is not leaving, or the membrane has torn and stone is coming up through it. A new surface laid on this is money set on fire, because it will fail the same way within two winters.

We survey before we quote

We dig trial holes. It is not glamorous and it is the only way to know which of the three problems you actually have. We look at the depth and condition of the remaining surface, the state of the membrane, whether the sub-base is still sound and compacted, and whether the drainage runs are flowing or blocked.

That survey is what tells us whether you are looking at a nine thousand pound top up or a twenty two thousand pound rebuild. Quoting a resurface without doing it is guessing, and the guess is always in the contractor's favour.

What refurbishment usually involves

Where the base is sound and the surface is finished, we strip and dispose of the old material, check and repair the membrane, then supply and lay a new surface to the correct depth. That is the straightforward case and it is quick.

Where drainage has failed, the work is bigger. Runs may need jetting, or excavating and replacing where they have silted or collapsed. Sometimes the original design was simply inadequate and needs supplementing rather than repairing. We would rather tell you that than sell you a surface.

Where the sub-base has gone, the honest answer is that you are rebuilding, and we will say so even though it is a harder conversation than taking the resurfacing job.

The upgrade worth considering while it is open

If the arena is stripped back anyway, the marginal cost of moving from plain sand to a wax coated fibre surface is much lower than doing it as a separate job later. A waxed surface holds moisture, rides consistently through a dry summer and a wet winter, and needs almost no watering.

It is the single upgrade owners most often tell us afterwards they should have taken. Whether it is worth it depends on how much you ride and on what, which is a conversation rather than a product page.

Timescales and disruption

A straightforward resurface on a sound base is usually a matter of days rather than weeks. A drainage repair extends it. A full rebuild is close to a new build in both time and cost.

We work around a yard rather than through it. If you have horses in and a single access track, that is a scheduling problem we should discuss at survey stage, not something to discover on the first morning.

What it costs, and why we publish that

A top up on a sound base is at the bottom of our refurbishment band. A full strip, drainage repair and new surface is at the top of it. The gap between those two is large, which is exactly why the survey comes first.

Both figures are on our pricing page. A refurbishment quote is very easy to inflate when the customer has no reference point at all and has already decided something must be done, so we would rather you had one.

What we see most often

The single most common finding is that the original arena was built without adequate drainage for the ground it sits on, usually a perimeter drain on a clay site. It worked for a few years while the sub-base was still clean, then stopped.

The second most common is a surface that has simply never been maintained to depth. It has thinned on the track and built up in the corners over a decade, and it needs material and a proper level rather than replacement.

The third is a torn or omitted membrane, where stone has worked up into the surface and the surface has worked down into the stone. Once those two layers have mixed, neither does its job, and that one genuinely does mean starting again.

Why we document what we build

The commonest problem we meet in a failed arena is not a hard one to diagnose. It is that nobody knows what is underneath it, so the survey starts with trial holes and guesswork rather than with a specification to check against.

That is why our own builds run a three stage sign-off and hand over a dimensioned record of the whole system. It is written for the person who has to refurbish this arena in twelve years, who may well not be us.