Five days at Ascot in June 2027. Four enclosures, from a £25 Windsor badge to a Royal Enclosure open only to Members and their guests.
Queen Anne founded Ascot in 1711, having ridden out from Windsor Castle six miles away and decided the common was fit for racing, and the first meeting was run there on 11 August that year. Her plans were announced in the London Gazette that July. The first public grandstand went up in 1839 and the course has rebuilt it five times since, most recently in June 2006, and three centuries have made the June meeting the centre of the British summer social calendar rather than merely its best racing.
Royal Ascot is organised by enclosure rather than by day, and the enclosures are the fixture. The Windsor Enclosure sets no formal dress code, the Queen Anne Enclosure asks for morning dress or a day dress and a hat, and the Royal Enclosure admits Members and their guests alone. It is the last of those that makes the meeting what it is, because an enclosure that cannot simply be bought is a rarer thing every year.
The 2027 meeting runs for five days, Tuesday 15 to Saturday 19 June, on a course that holds 80,000. The Gold Cup on the Thursday is the race Ascot was eventually built around, run over two and a half miles and the longest championship distance on the flat. Ascot takes some 600,000 people across its whole racing year, and it races over jumps as well as on the flat, which few of the great flat courses do.