As I watched Jenny weave her way on horseback through the busy traffic of Queen’s Gate and head off for a trot around Hyde Park, I tried to imagine what the streets around Kensington would have looked like in the heyday of the horse. I realise that the images I conjured up are based on Hollywood versions of Dickens and George Bernard Shaw - London as a dark-brown, foggy city of narrow streets full of drunks and urchins, which I’m sure is completely wrong for Brompton Road and Knightsbridge, which feel too posh even for smog. Then I tried to picture something more suited to my surroundings - a tree-lined square and a gentleman with hat and cane escorting a lady with parasol and wide-skirted dress, the kind of scene that is straight out of
My Fair Lady
or perhaps
Oliver!
when things started looking up for Mark Lester. Then I realise what’s missing from these visions, salvaged from my memory of wet Sunday afternoons spent watching the TV: none of them has any proper traffic on the roads.
I decided to try another experiment, replacing every white van and truck I could see with a cart or horse-drawn wagon, the buses with the horse-drawn omnibus, black cabs with the original ‘Hackney carriage’. It wasn’t long before my imaginary Knightsbridge was packed full of horses, and that’s even before I started adding private transport.
A Victorian journalist by the name of W. J. Gordon (I hesitate to call him a ‘hack’) wrote the definitive work on this subject -
The Horse-World of London
, published in 1893 - in which he attempted to record for his fellow Londoners, and I include myself in his audience, the role of the horse in Victorian London. Gordon estimated the number of horses in London as 300,000, compared to a human population of about seven million. That would mean that there was about one horse for every 20 Londoners. That’s a lot of horseflesh. Even Michael Cimino, the infamous
Heaven’s Gate
director, with the film budget of his dreams, might struggle to depict an authentic London of 100 years ago. It was heaving with horses.
Gordon breaks down that figure of 300,000 into a dozen categories of work horses. I won’t go into the detail here except to note that brewers’ horses are in a class of their own. It’s no surprise they justified their own category, given the huge volume of public houses that abounded in London in the nineteenth century, and given my fondness for the London pub, I’m glad they’re singled out for attention.
You don’t have to think too long and hard before you realise what a huge industry must have revolved around those 300,000 horses: their housing and welfare, food, harnesses, saddles and general horse paraphernalia. Then there were all the related jobs - from the vet to the lowly crossing-sweeper whose job was to dart across busy streets to clear the horse manure so that the gentry could cross from one side of the road to the other without dragging their crinolines in the piles of excrement.
The crossing-sweeper, or ‘orderly boy’, is remembered in a rather romanticised statue in Paddington Street Gardens, just to the west of Marylebone High Street. There is a cuteness to the figure - his head cocked to one side, his face cherubic and well fed, despite his shoeless feet - that doesn’t ring true. Perhaps a more accurate depiction of a crossing-sweeper is the one given by Dickens in the form of the wretched pauper Jo in
Bleak House
. Jo’s death causes Dickens to make an impassioned criticism of his own society’s hypocrisy and its failures to deal with poverty.
Horse-drawn London also had some pretty appalling traffic and congestion problems. Seems it wasn’t very different from today. It was quicker to travel from London to Brighton than it was to cross the city and, judging by early film reels from 1910, pedestrians took their lives in their hands when trying to navigate their way through waves of horse-drawn traffic. My driving instructor would have been appalled at the absence of lane discipline. I suspect that complaining about the roads, other road-users, traffic and pollution is just another continuum of London life. Rickets may have been eradicated, but moaning about pollution, noise and the traffic is, I think, something we may have inherited from the Victorians.
Despite the sheer number of horses on the move in Victorian London, there is not much surviving evidence of their presence. The crossing-sweepers might have cleared up all the dung, but you’d think there’d be something besides a few mews houses to remind us of a third of a million horses wandering the streets of the city. Actually, there is something else after all, and - what’s more - it is right on my own doorstep in north London.
It’s very easy to mooch around a neighbourhood, feeling totally familiar and comfortable with your surroundings for years, without really looking closely at what lies just beneath the surface. Just a short canter from my own front door is a place where I’ve whiled away many a weekend morning over the past 20 years or more, without ever really stopping to think about its horsey associations. It’s called Camden Stables Market and it’s part of the complex known collectively as Camden Market. The use of the word ‘stables’ will have already alerted the sensitive reader to the fact that this part of the market was once something other than an ‘alternative’ shopping magnet for self-styled London bohemians in all their rich and colourful variety.
It’s not that I didn’t clock this fact at the time - simply that I never thought very much about what the name actually said about the history of the place. I suppose you could accuse me of wearing blinkers, but I usually had other things on my mind when I visited. I’ve been going to the market for years and my two daughters used to run a stall there, selling home-made clothes. When I wasn’t giving them a hand, I would happily take a wander along the busy walkways in search of rare vinyl imports or a bite to eat. Uncovering the origins of the place never seemed to feature during any of those leisurely strolls. Until now.
My route to the market takes me north from Camden tube station up Camden High Street towards Camden Lock, and if you head that way you pass the Roundhouse en route. This grand old building - refurbished a few years ago as a performance venue - was built in 1846 as part of an engine-shed complex for the Midland Railway, which ran trains into this part of London from the north. It’s a funny old building because it’s not square, like I think you’d expect. It is round - see what is happening there with the name again? - and it’s round because it contained a turntable to turn engines around. But it looks more like a temple than part of a train depot. It’s a real landmark on the walk up to the market, and we’re lucky it survived Victorian demolition because only ten years after it was built it was redundant, as the engines had got bigger and didn’t fit inside any more. All that work with a compass consigned to the bin.
Aside from its architectural charm, it’s worth noting the Roundhouse on your way up to the market because the railway and all its associated sheds and shunting areas also explain the presence of the stables. They were built by the same people, the Midland Railway Company, in the middle of the nineteenth century, at about the same time that the Roundhouse went up, at a time when this part of Camden was what we would call a transport hub. Horses were a central part of the set-up, used to unload and transport the goods which had been carried here by rail from the industrial north. Some took to the road and made deliveries to the rest of the capital, others headed for the nearby Regent’s Canal.
The Regent’s Canal was a major thoroughfare through London, running east to west. It flowed from the Limehouse Basin at the Thames through Islington and then underground in a long tunnel to King’s Cross before winding north to Camden. From Camden the canal then stretched out west to join up with the Grand Union Canal and Paddington, the terminus of Brunel’s Great Western Railway. So Camden was, as I always instinctively knew, pretty much the epicentre of London’s comings and goings one way or another.
On my most recent visit to the market I noticed a few desultory shoppers around, but most of the stalls were closed as it was midweek. If I’d wanted a kaftan or a piercing I’d have left disappointed, but this time my focus was on something different - I was shopping for atmosphere and insight. As I wandered along the cobbled walkways, I more or less had the place to myself and it didn’t take long to see that these must once have been stables on an industrial scale. The whole site is a mishmash of old warehouse buildings and stable blocks where the horses put their hooves up after a busy day at work. It’s built on several different levels - above and below ground - and there are ramps round every corner. Stairs and horses don’t really mix very well. Besides the architecture itself, I started to spot other remnants from the market’s former life, including rings bolted to the grey brick walls which would once have been tethering places for the animals.
There was also once a horse hospital on site, which was much in demand, since working life for these creatures was a hard slog. If you pop your head inside one of the buildings that used to house the hospital, you’ll discover that today it’s a second-hand furniture warehouse, chock-a-block with merchandise. It’s a huge space. At least 20 feet above your head are cast-iron pillars which support the roof. Each of them has deep-set grooves, slots which would once have held in place a series of wooden planks dividing the space into smaller stalls for the horses. In the corners, where wall and ceiling meet, there are the old hatchways which would have been used to shovel in hay for the horses from street level up above. Through the gloom I could see someone crouched over a table, polishing it up to a lovely sheen. A hundred years ago his predecessor might have stood there shodding a horse instead.
There were reminders of the place’s former function wherever I looked, and not just above ground level. Beneath this huge site, a network of tunnels - or catacombs, as they are more atmospherically described in the history books - was built by the Midland Railway, linking canal-side warehouses with goods yards and railway depots, going the most direct route underground rather than joining the throng of traffic above ground.
It’s actually a bit spooky down there - dark and wet - and as I splashed through the puddles in my brogues, it was easy to imagine how these passageways would once have echoed with the sound of horses’ hooves as they shunted railway wagons and carried goods away from the depot to other parts of the capital. Looking up from the catacombs at the beautiful arches of brick (the Victorians loved a brick - I can’t help thinking they would never have been so lovingly laid in this century), cast-iron ventilation grilles set in the roof provided the only source of light and fresh air to the beasts of burden below. You can still spot some of these grilles above ground along Chalk Farm Road.
The tunnels have been revamped and there is now quite an extraordinary sculpture of galloping horses protruding above the entrance to this part of the market, with an accompanying history cast in bronze and a rearing beast at ground level which I think is meant to be welcoming rather than off-putting. These beauties are more thoroughbred than beast of burden, so given what we know and can guess about the lives of the horses that lived and worked here, it is probably fair to say a bit of artistic licence has been exercised by the sculptor.
After my visit to the stables at Camden, I had the bit between my teeth, as it were. I started to realise that there were more remnants of horse-drawn London knocking around the place than I’d thought. For example, in certain parts of London, revealed beneath the wearing tarmac, you can see wooden cobbles, such as in Endell Street, which runs south off High Holborn down into Covent Garden. Heading a bit further east towards the Barbican, at Chequer Street, near Bunhill Fields, the nonconformist cemetery and last resting place of one of London’s great sons, William Blake, there’s another visible stretch of wooden cobbles, about ten paces in length.
Many roads, particularly those that took heavy traffic or which were sited near hospitals or the houses of the well-to-do, were blessed with wooden rather than granite-block cobbled roads. The wooden surface, covered with tar, was considerably quieter but also kinder to the joints of the horses. After the Second World War most of the tar-covered blocks were ripped up and sold off as domestic fuel, but the eagle-eyed can still spot a few lingering survivors here and there.
Another relic from those days is the assortment of granite drinking troughs that are dotted around the city. Most of these were established in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the second phase of a campaign which began with the introduction of public drinking fountains for the city’s human inhabitants.
An august body, the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association, founded by Samuel Gurney MP with support from the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Earl of Carlisle and the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, started installing fountains around the city in 1859. This was the year after the ‘Big Stink’, a year when sewerage was at its worst and the city was permeated by a germ-heavy fug. This year of the stink followed two decades marred by cholera outbreaks which caused many deaths. Before the fountains were established, fresh drinking water was a rare commodity and the cheapest and most readily available drink for Londoners of all ages was beer, which I must say does have a certain appeal.
Thanks to Mr Gurney and his friends, all that changed in 1859, and his name still adorns the first fountain, which survives to this day on Holborn Viaduct, outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the City of London, in sight of the Old Bailey. Once they’d sorted out the drinking arrangements for the human population of London, the campaigners - under pressure from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals - turned their attention to the needs of the horses. Not more than 200 yards behind the water fountain on Holborn Viaduct is a granite trough for animal refreshment in West Smithfield. The smell of raw meat can hang in the air, reminding me that Smithfield is still a working meat-market to this day. For those vegetarians who wish to forego this particular sightseeing trip, I can report that the trough is surprisingly large - maybe 12 or 14 feet in length - and was planted with winter pansies when I saw it.