It’s official: the most pony-mad postcode in the UK is NOT in Surrey or Cheshire!
UK horse riders love company, with just under 80,000 equestrian events listed online last year alone. As we've got the biggest database of UK riding events online, we thought we'd dip into the archive and see what's really going on out there. Just a quick glance immediately shows that horse riding is as popular as ever with at least 30 events across Great Britain every single day in 2025, except for just three days over Christmas.
Bookings peaked on March 16th with an amazing 324 events advertised online for hardy horse enthusiasts who weren’t put off by cooler weather; in fact February and March accounted for seven of the top ten busiest days of last year. The peak of the season was definitely in May with 4,851 events but August and September were quieter than February and January respectively, showing conclusively that UK ponies prefer to brave the cold than swelter in the late summer heat.
With all the prep work that goes into attending a riding event it's a lot more work to attend an event midweek but the weekend only accounted for half of events last year. Wednesday was the most popular midweek day, with about 12% of the total, but there were plenty of events all week round - even the quietest day, Monday, accounted for just under 8%.
The busiest postcodes for events in the UK were central and south, the top five being LE (Leicester), GU (Guildford), RG (Reading), B (Birmingham) and GL (Gloucester) - the latter hosting an astonishing 1,796 organised events alone, in contrast to the quietest postcode with just a handful of events scheduled in the HS area on Stornoway.
It's tempting to think that just sticking to one booking site will be enough, especially if you only ever visit the same few local venues. Some will have an in-house booking system but many play host to several different event organisers through the year, each of whom are free to choose any third-party booking platform they like.
This is a surprisingly common situation. Across the UK there are 85 different riding venues which have upcoming events listed right now on at least two different booking sites and, last summer, there were venues with fixtures listed on as many as five different directories. That's five different sites to check, just to keep up with events at one venue! It’s worse if you’re prepared to travel: keeping up with every event with a TA postcode last year would have meant regularly checking at least eleven different websites!
Thank goodness for PADDOX, keeping you informed from one central search. With our new email notification system, subscribers can easily set up their favourite searches and get regular updates whenever we find new events, or updates to known ones.
Get signed up today, and never miss another riding event again.
PADDOX is the UK's only comprehensive equestrian event listing website. If you want to find an event for you and your pony we probably have one in our database.
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