Our heritage · Victorian working horses
Equestrian Stables Heritage Report
London once had 300,000 working horses. The stables, hayloft and carriage arch at The Yard are one of the last places in central London where you can still see where they lived.
Heritage report · Graham Tite, 2016
The Yard and London's Working Horses
Written by Graham Tite, MA (Cantab.), MSc, IHBC, conservation officer, in February 2016. It assesses how important The Yard's buildings and surviving features are when compared with other equestrian sites in central London.
Introduction
Within less than a mile of Rupert Street, the surviving fragments of stables, mews and yards add up to an almost complete picture of how horses were used for trade in central London in late-Victorian and Edwardian times. The Yard is a vital part of this rare group of buildings.
A city of 300,000 horses
"At the dawn of the 20th century, there were an estimated 300,000 horses living and working within the city limits of Great Britain's capital" (W.J. Gordon, The Horse World of Victorian London). Only a small share were kept for private riding, military display, the police or the fire brigades. Most supplied the muscle power that moved London's people and goods before the motor engine took over from about 1910.
More than 20,000 horses pulled omnibuses and trams, and about the same number worked in the cab trade. More than 250,000 more delivered goods and services and carried away the city's waste.
Horses in the heart of the city
Most of London's working horses lived in stables near what were then the edges of the city and came into the centre each day. The large two-storey Farm Lane depot near Stamford Bridge, where the Road Car Company kept 700 horses, is one example, though nothing significant of it survives. Paddington, with the old Great Western Railway buildings and the canal basin, is another area that was once home to big fleets of horse-drawn vehicles.
For a central district like Soho, though, bringing horses in from Fulham or Paddington every morning and back every evening was not practical. A small number of horses lived right in central London to serve small businesses and specialist trades, such as dairies, dealers in other perishable food and the delivery of small, valuable loads.
Stables and the care of working horses
In residential areas such as Pimlico and Kensington it is common to find mews that once housed many horses, most of them privately owned. These later became garages, and many are now fashionable small houses, with the old stable and carriage house below and the former hayloft and staff rooms above.
Most of London's horses worked for less than ten years. Collapsed horses were a common sight, blocking traffic and drawing crowds. The larger stables cared for their own sick and injured animals, and two horse hospital sites are known nearby, one in Soho and one opposite Russell Square station. Horses that could not be cured were slaughtered. Nineteenth-century maps show a horse slaughterhouse on Vauxhall Bridge Road, though the main one was at Garratt Lane in Wandsworth. There was a trade in the meat and other by-products, and frozen carcasses were exported to Europe.
What equestrian sites look like
Given the geography of late-19th-century London, its working horses were almost never put out to pasture or kept in paddocks. A London horse spent its life working six days a week, for up to about ten hours a day, on cobbled streets, and was stabled indoors in the middle of the city. Apart from the big operators such as the omnibus companies and the major breweries, purpose-built stables (often several storeys high) were the exception. Most horses were kept close to the business they served, and The Yard is an example of this.
The building shows evidence of mixed use: stabling and a shop on the ground floor, a hayloft and possibly storage on the first floor, and staff accommodation and other living space above.
In and around The Yard you can still find carriage arches, surviving mews buildings, warehouses of the same period and narrow lanes that served the bigger streets nearby, where loads could be dropped off. Smaller details such as kerbstones survive too. Other relevant sites close to Rupert Street include:
- Newman Passage, linking Newman Street and Rathbone Place
- Portland Mews, Soho, off D'Arblay Street
- The lane in front of St Giles in the Fields church
- Little Russell Street, Bloomsbury, and nearby
- Bridle Lane, Soho (since modernised)
- Hanbury Place
- Duck Lane, Soho (since modernised)
- Dansey Place, behind Gerrard Street, Soho
Together these show features common to inner-city equestrian buildings:
- Gentle curves and slopes suited to horse-drawn carts
- Narrow widths suited to carts pulled by a single horse
- Lucams and hoists for lifting goods from carts into warehouse doors, with their brackets and hinges
- Cobblestones and kerbstones
- Curved walls
Conclusion
The buildings of The Yard still form a nearly complete set. There is the entrance arch (now without its kerbstones), the passage and small yard with its curved wall, and the stabling with iron posts and tethering rings. Upstairs are the hayloft and living quarters with a fireplace, the surviving first-floor roof structure and ceramic tiling that also appears to be original.
Any yard used for stabling horses needed ventilation. Larger purpose-built stables could have plenty of side windows and high roofs. In a tightly packed area like Soho, only a yard open to the sky, like The Yard, could work. For that reason alone, enclosing or roofing over the central yard could not be done without a complete "loss of character and special interest".
As far as the author knows, The Yard is also the only site in this part of central London where evidence of original stabling inside commercial premises can still be found in the existing building.
References
- W.J. Gordon, The Horse World of Victorian London (London, 1893; republished by The Long Riders' Guild Press, 2011)
- G. Worsley, The British Stable (Yale University Press, London, 2004)
- W. Miles, General Remarks on Stables (London, 1860–1888)
- F. Fitzwyngram, Horses and Stables (London, 1896–1904)
- The Midhurst Society, Four-Legged Midhurst (Midhurst, Sussex, 2011)
Source: Graham Tite, MA (Cantab.), MSc, IHBC, Conservation Officer – "The Yard, Rupert Street, Soho: the wider context – equestrian sites in Central London", 13 February 2016.
More from our heritage
Victorian Heritage Report · LGBTQIA+ Heritage Report · Back to Our History