Newmarket is often referred to as the home of British horse racing. Its two racecourses, The Rowley Mile and the July Course, have long been home to premier events in the British horse racing season, but it goes beyond that now, because Newmarket also has the National Stud, the National Horse Racing Museum, the world’s oldest horse auction yards, and around sixty stables. There are also around three and a half thousand horses living in and around Newmarket. One of the hotels on our list of the best places to stay in Newmarket is The Jockey Club, an institution indelibly tied to Newmarket’s horse racing, but we also recommend a spa hotel and a fantastic country escape.
Newmarket is only around twenty minutes from Cambridge, and just a short jaunt from London, so the best hotels here are popular during the racing season, and the off season. There are museums, and horsey art, and the fact that Newmarket is effectively where the English Civi War started, after Charles I refused to surrender the armed forces to Parliament at his palace here in 1642 to discover too.
Most of Newmarket’s racing stables are within the centre of town, close to the training grounds, which are charmingly called ‘the gallops’, and there are special horse routes throughout town allowing horses to travel between their stables and the training grounds and equine rehabilitation centres. If you’re not a horse-lover the best places to stay in Newmarket still have something to offer you, though, firstly, the opportunity to escape to the country — possibly to a spa hotel — secondly to appreciate the incredible Suffolk landscape and local National Trust properties. and as a base for visiting the wider area, including Cambridge and Bury St Edmunds.