Free lessons, funded by followers: is this what saves British riding schools?

The economics always seemed obvious: horses cost more than they used to, haylage is now £50-60 a bale in some parts of the UK, lesson prices can't keep pace with running costs, and so the gates close and the land gets sold for housing. I understood the problem without ever questioning who had defined it.

Then I heard Chloe Tinson explain that her riding school, come April, will have its business rates increased because the government classifies it the same as a hotel.

This is not a metaphor. Riding schools are formally categorised as leisure businesses, which means the same regulatory logic applies to Barnwell Equestrian Centre in Cornwall as to a Travelodge. The solution a hotel might reach for, if costs rise, is to open more rooms or put prices up. The solution available to Chloe is limited by how many hours each horse can ethically work in a day. These are not comparable problems. Calling them the same thing tells you something important about how invisible the equestrian industry remains to the people writing the rules.

Since 2020, an estimated 330 riding schools have closed across the UK. Before the pandemic, we'd already lost 20% of riding schools over a decade. This is not a blip. It is a structural collapse, happening slowly enough that each individual closure feels like a local tragedy rather than a national one.

Chloe took over Barnwell from her mother, who has been running it since the 1980s. She has signed on for five more years. She knows the maths doesn't work. And so, rather than wait for a solution that wasn't coming, she started posting on TikTok.

Every day, at least one minute of video. Honest, unpolished, direct to camera: this is what we're trying to do, this is what it costs, this is why it matters. She calls each day by its number. When Anna Louise spoke to her, Chloe was on day 64. Across TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, she has built a following of over 50,000 people. In January, views and donations raised £750. That money funded free riding lessons for children from low-income families, children struggling with mental health, children who had applied through her website and answered questions honestly about where they were in life.

The sessions run in groups of four. Beginners. She takes them through basic position and getting comfortable in the saddle, and she says that by the end, the children who arrived shy and quiet had opened up completely. They were giving feedback, chatting, smiling. That is not a leisure outcome. That is a therapeutic one. The government just hasn't looked closely enough to notice.

What Chloe has built is not a charity. It is a third economic model. The content funds the sessions; the sessions generate more content; the community grows and the riding school fills with paying clients who found her through the algorithm. She is, at day 64, busier than she has ever been. She is also still working out whether the numbers add up.

There is a version of this conversation where Chloe is the answer. There is also a version where she is evidence of a broken system, where a skilled instructor who has been running a riding school for years, who has worked as a support worker and a delivery driver and a bin collector to keep the horses fed, should not have to build a social media audience to fund lessons for children who can't afford £25.

Both things are true at the same time.

The internet didn't save Chloe's riding school. Chloe did — by using the internet to show people what they were about to lose.

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