Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

In most towns and cities, you can probably, if you look hard enough, find evidence of the working horse, even if it’s just in the names of streets. And although many buildings have disappeared entirely, some still survive, even if they have found other uses entirely. One such is the railway stables that served the goods yards of Euston Station and the surrounding canals. Inner city stables like these housed an astonishing number of horses, often in surprisingly small spaces. If you are used to the open spaces of most modern yards, it’s difficult to imagine that once hundreds of horses were stabled around Chalk Farm Road, in what has become known as Camden Stables. At its peak, the goods stables housed 700–800 horses, with more stables at the termini for those horses who transported passengers. © IWM (D 16820) The first run of stables was built in 1839, but they and the surrounding buildings saw decades of expansion and rebuilding. The earliest range of stables th...

There are no horses working in the shunting and goods yards of British railways now: the last one retired in 1967. That horse was the last of a phenomenon that had lasted over 100 years.  At its height, in 1913, there were 27,826 railway-owned cartage and shunting horses in the UK, a number  Bryan Holden in his  The Long Haul  describes as declining to 9,077 by 1945. This decline had effects that were noticed by even the higher echelons of society.  Riding Magazine , whose readership were not generally troubled by lack of money, noted with concern in its July 1951 edition that the number of railway horses on parade at the 55 th  Annual Show of the London Cart Horse Parade Society at Regent’s Park had dropped from 61 to 14. The decline, as with the agricultural industry, was driven by the replacement of horses with motorised transport. This was not a process that happened immediately: it took 40 years. The Second World War, and the rationing of ...