Ascot will look a little different this weekend, physically and in a human sense. The old lady is not at her best at the moment, great acres of earth scarring among the foremost, and prettiest, racecourses in the world.
Yet despite the ugliness, a by-product of the Ascot redevelopment, the course executive is expecting a rather plump crowd on Saturday for the fifth running of the Shergar Cup.Pre-sales are up by 40 per cent on last year’s meeting and an audience of over 20,000 is predicted. There will be thundery showers for the next 36 hours, especially in the east.”. Drivers were warned to take care on roads as conditions worsened.

The heaviest rainfall was recorded in central and southern England in mid-afternoon yesterday.At BBC studios in White City, west London, a ground-floor studio in which the current affairs programme Newsnight was to go to air had to be evacuated after minor flooding. The programme’s presenter Kirsty Wark and other staff moved to another studio within the building.Brendan Jones at the PA WeatherCentre said: “It will be turning fresher across the country over the next 24-36 hours, but it’s going to be a slow process. The other three were reported to have suffered spinal injuries and were also taken to hospital. One witness said that as many as six people were lifted into the air by the strike.Much of England was hit by violent storms as the heatwave that had engulfed the country over the past few days turned to torrential rain. One of the women stopped breathing and was taken to hospital There was no word on her condition last night.

Last week, the Government published data showing the changing nature of Britain’s wildlife populations with species such as gulls, grey squirrels and feral pigeons flourishing to the detriment of others.The water vole, best known as Ratty from The Wind in the Willows , has seen its population fall from an estimated seven million in the 1960s to just 900,000. A rich diversity of species, ranging from bream and bats to molluscs and freshwater sponges, has seen more than a thousand sections of canal and river given protected status.But waterways are also a battleground for survival, with long-established species facing extinction while new species expand at alarming rates. But we want to be able to provide an accurate picture of just what there is on our waterways. Half of the population lives within five miles of a canal or river so we would like the public to gather the raw data.”Naturalists point to Britain’s 3,000-mile network with its hundreds of miles of uninterrupted hedgerow as an ideal haven for wildlife.