THE ROYAL WINDSOR HORSE SHOW
Mid May · Home Park, Windsor · Four Days · Since 1943
The Royal Windsor Horse Show is four days in the middle of May in Home Park, the private grounds below Windsor Castle. It is the only time of year those grounds are open to the public.
It is the only show in Britain that holds international competitions in show jumping, dressage, driving and endurance at once, with more than a hundred and twenty showing classes besides.
Wings for Victory
The show began in the war. On Wednesday 26 May 1943 Count Robert Orssich and Geoffrey Cross held a show at Windsor for the Wings for Victory campaign, and by the show’s own count it raised enough to buy seventy-eight Typhoon fighters.
The King and Queen came, with both princesses. Princess Elizabeth, who was seventeen, won the Pony and Dogcart class.
Throughout her reign she entered horses and ponies she had bred herself. Her husband drove in the International Driving Grand Prix until 2003.
It has been cancelled three times since 1943, the last in 2020. In 2026, on the Friday, it marked a hundred years since the Queen was born.
The Rings
Home Park holds several rings at once. In one, the show jumpers. In another, carriages driven at speed through a course of obstacles. In the showing rings, hunters, cobs and ponies are judged on how they are made and how they go, rather than on what they can jump.
The endurance riders go out into Windsor Great Park.
The King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, gives its musical drive, and children race Shetland ponies in the Shetland Pony Grand National.
The show ends on the Sunday with the Rolex Grand Prix, the jumping class the week builds to.
What to Know
It runs from Thursday to Sunday, and the Grand Prix is on the Sunday.
Club membership is the grander ticket, with an enclosure of its own. Day tickets cover the rest of the park.
Country attire. It is a park in May, and it can be wet.
Badminton comes the week before, and Trooping the Colour and Royal Ascot follow in June.
The mistake is to watch only the main arena. The showing rings are the older sport, and the quieter one.
The Court
The Royal Windsor Horse Show is not the Court’s own. Club membership, and a table in the enclosure, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in Windsor or in London, and the table afterward.
How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.
Set down September MMXXVI