Chasing more horse ghosts in London.
Category Archives: London
A Street Filled with 102 Horses
From Tom Crewe’s review of A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain in the London Review of Books: “At 11am on 22 November 1827 Francis Place, the reformer and radical, stuck his head out of his bedroom window in Charing Cross and put down on paper the activity …
Horses in the Wings
The theatrical and circus historian A H Saxon is the don of hippodrama history. I bought an old library copy of his Enter Foot and Horse when I was working on The Age of the Horse because I knew it would be the key to nineteenth-century equestrian theatre. I wasn’t disappointed. Hippodramas were, to quote …
Horses in the Thames
The Thames at Lambeth, 1934. A barge is unloaded and the goods taken away by cart.
Horse-oil Gâteau and Pegasus Filet: a Hippophagic Banquet
In the nineteenth century, vets, scientists, doctors, social campaigners, animal-welfare advocates and other prominent figures in Europe and America decreed that horsemeat was just the stuff for the working classes to eat. The proletariat lacked red meat, it was argued, and yet city streets were filled with horses that, once their working life came to …
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The Horse Ghosts of East London
I had some time to kill near Liverpool Street Station in London yesterday and remembered a quest I’d started to put together earlier this year, before it was cut short by health problems. In The Age of the Horse I’ve tried to write a sweeping, single-take overview of all the ways in which horses powered Britain in the nineteenth …
Grooming the Horses of War
“Workmen cleaning the immense statue of two horses pulling a quadriga or chariot atop the Wellington Arch on Hyde Park Corner, London, by Harry Todd.”
Talking Horses: Honhy, Honhy, Hon! A Victorian Policeman is Saluted.
In his 29-year career as a policeman in Victorian London, John Pegg oversaw over 1,300 convictions for cruelty to horses. This poem was written “on behalf” of those horses by George H Hutt in 1892. Read more about Hutt – “the police poet” – and Pegg here, along with a collection of other “horses’ …
Continue reading “Talking Horses: Honhy, Honhy, Hon! A Victorian Policeman is Saluted.”
Hazards of a Horse-drawn City
On Tuesday afternoon, a poor boy, named Alfred Hartley, while passing through Bath-street, Tabernacle-square, very imprudently struck the nose-bag of a dray horse which was standing in the street while the brewers were delivering beer at the Hen and Chickens public-house. The horse instantly kicked the unfortunate lad in the stomach, who staggered a few …