Camden Stables – in Search of Horse Ghosts

I originally wrote this post when the bronze statues were still there. I’ve updated it to reflect the fact they’ve gone. I’ve also added in some information about how the horses were shod to tackle the ramp.

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.

VAN GIRL: HORSE AND CART DELIVERIES FOR THE LONDON, MIDLAND AND SCOTTISH RAILWAY, LONDON, ENGLAND, 1943 (D 16820) Lilian Carpenter leads her horse Snowball from the stables to the loading dock or ‘bank’, to collect the van she will be driving today. The van has already been loaded and is waiting for them at the ‘bank’. Several other delivery workers can be seen in a line behind Lilian, also leading their horses out to begin the day’s work. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205200497

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 that still survives today was built in 1844­–6, and housed around 160 horses. These stables, large as they were, were joined by more and more as the Victorian era strode on and the boom in trade required more cartage.

Stables were built to the west of the railway line in 1856 for another 150 or so horses. North of this another building was added for about 70 horses. The buildings were dramatically extended when Gilbeys, the drinks manufacturer, arrived at the site. By 1881, when more space was needed, there was not much option of where to go, other than up. Although room was found to build a two-storey horse hospital, new floors were added to existing ranges, and the horses found their way up via ramps or horse stairs.

Ramp up to the horse hospital

You’ll notice that the paver blocks are a uniform size. There’s a reason for this: the horses were shod with toe and heel calks positioned in just the right place to grip between the paver blocks. This meant horses could be uniformly shod, and also be able to get a grip if the roads were slippery or they were pulling a heavy load.

Not only were there horses, there was a forge, saddler, harness room, provender department, and housing for the superintendent. And not only were there were stables, there were tunnels, used to get the horses from the stables to the stations where they were to work.

The picture below shows Lilian Carpenter leading Snowball along the horse tunnels. It’s interesting to note that he didn’t need leading back – he could apparently be left to make the journey back to his stable on his own. Lilian Carpenter joined the LMS (London, Midland and Scottish Railway) during World War II, and was one of the subjects of a photo essay in 1943 by Ministry of Information Photo Division photographer Richard Stone, showing a day in the life of a van girl during the war.

VAN GIRL: HORSE AND CART DELIVERIES FOR THE LONDON, MIDLAND AND SCOTTISH RAILWAY, LONDON, ENGLAND, 1943 (D 16821) Lilian Carpenter leads her horse Snowball through the tunnel which connects the stables to the loading bay or ‘bank’, at the start of her day’s work as a delivery driver for LMS Railway. The original caption states that Snowball ‘makes the return journey unescorted’. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205200498

Everyday life in the stables is difficult to imagine if you visit them now, but there is an excellent British Pathé film shot in 1949 about the flu epidemic that swept the Chalk Farm stables that gives you a fine idea of what life was like. It shows the forge, stables, tack room and provender store, and a vet administering medicine.

Less than twenty years after this film was shot, not a single horse remained. The last horse working on the UK railways worked at Newmarket and retired in 1967.

Most of the Chalk Farm stables have now been demolished, apart from the stables immediately to the west of Chalk Farm Road. Of the others, little else remains apart from the tunnels and horse stairs that once connected them to the goods yard. Like the ghostly unused tube stations that still survive beneath London, these reminders of London’s equine past still exist. You can see an excellent set of photographs by Nick Catford here.

The stables themselves are very different now. Most of what survives has been converted into retail units after the stables underwent a huge conversion programme in the first decade of this century.

Camden Stables is listed, and while it’s good that the country does recognise the importance the horse played in its past, it leads to interesting problems when attempting to reconcile this past with the needs of the present.

When I visited, the developers had scattered the place with bronze horses and murals in an effort to connect the place with its past. I’m not sure how successful the bronze horses were in conveying much of a sense of what life was like. They’ve all gone now. A further redevelopment in 2015 swept them all away, and they were sold off at auction.

I had mixed feelings about them when I visited. The bronze horses felt something of a sop to the conservation authorities, who like conversions of industrial properties to have some sort of nod to their past. The whole concept seemed muddled. Wild horses burst out of the entrance arch, but on the floor below was a farrier. Was this intended as a comment on man’s domination of horses’ essential wild nature? Or of the horses escaping the domination of man? Or just a clumsy juxtaposition?

As for getting any sense now of what it was like to live and work in the stables as they were built, I found it a struggle when I visited. Although the basic format of the stables still remained, as did the loose boxes, there was very little sense of horse, despite all those large metal horses.

I’m not quite sure what it was that gave it (to me at least) so little sense of its industrial heritage. I think it’s because the most noticeable thing about the place was the reason people were there, and that was to buy things, or wander along and inspect what has become a tourist destination. You were surrounded by people whose focus was things, and not by people and animals performing hard physical work.

That is fair enough, as that’s why the buildings now survive, and have to some extent been preserved. But the atmosphere of the place was not that different to anywhere else. We went to Carnaby Street afterwards, and the feel of the place was similar: if anything, Carnaby Street had an honesty that Camden Stables lacked.

Those bronze horses had a feeling of a case full of dodos. The real horses were extinct, and like dodos, the bronze horses were something just to look at, or to pass by, incurious, on your way to the next food stall.

The horse ghosts are still there in Camden, but you need to look for them. The horse hospital was easier to imagine as it had been, probably because it is now a club and not a retail space, and it was pretty much deserted when we went there.

I felt, I think a rueful sort of sadness when I visited. There was nothing there I wanted to buy: I have enough t-shirts. It was as if a cathedral had been turned into a shopping centre. Instead of that pull of centuries of tradition with generation after generation using the building for the purpose for which it was intended, this was I suppose, overlaying one manifestation of capitalism with another. The market had indeed moved on.

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More on the stables

Photographs copyright Jane Badger, except where stated

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