Historical geographies of the horse in Britain
Neil Ward
The horse has shaped our (more-than-) human geography for centuries, but we are not used to thinking about how animals co-construct places. Over a century past the point of ‘peak horse’ in Britain, what is the horse’s legacy and how is its role in social and economic life changing?
Horses have had a greater impact on the geography of Britain over the past two millennia than any other non-human animal. (Discuss!) Although a subject of growing interest in History and other humanities subjects, their profile in Animal Geographies belies their historical and contemporary significance. Originally hunted by humans for food, then domesticated in the Eurasian steppes more than 5,000 years ago, the utilisation of horses in war and conquest was crucial in the rise and fall of ancient civilisations. In Britain, they were present and instrumental in their thousands at the last two major invasions by Roman and Norman forces.
From around the fourteenth century, horses gradually replaced the ox as the draught animal of choice in British agriculture, and their bodies and toil underpinned the explosion of human territorial mobility from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The increasingly efficient exploitation of the horse through the Tudor system of postal roads helped news travel more swiftly, brought into being a nation increasingly in touch with itself and shaped settlement patterns and the growth of market towns as coaching stops. At the same time, the management of rural land to ensure good sport for hunters on horseback made a lasting impression on the rural landscape and its patchwork of small woodlands.
The horse also played an important role in the early rumblings of the industrial revolution. They hauled barges along canals and walked round and round in circles to drive the gin mills that powered early industrial processing. Even with the growth of steam power, horses were required down in the mines and at the surface to haul coal. The advent of the railway made travel further afield easier, but the associated growth in demand for haulage, cabs and omnibuses required more and more horses to cart people and stuff to and from railway stations. With Britain’s rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, towns and cities became increasingly moulded around the horse. Horse-drawn omnibuses enabled daily commuting and facilitated urban expansion. The desirable mews developments of London’s sprawling West End were designed to accommodate well-to-do families and their servants, but also their horses, coaches and feed. The ebb and flow of hay into the city, and dung out of it, was part of the rhythm of urban life.
Horses were also central to the development of British military culture and instrumental in exercising imperial power and oppression. Horsemanship was encouraged for the young men of the ruling elite, and integral to notions of ‘gentlemanliness’ and imperial masculinity. Horses were used in the management of enslaved labour on plantations and deployed to chase down runaways(1). Although the British Empire was forged on trade and sea-power, cavalry forces were important in putting down rebellion.
Decline of empire coincided with decline of the horse. Horse numbers in Britain started to fall in the first decade of the twentieth century from their peak of 3.3 million. The adoption of the machine gun rapidly undermined the use of mounted cavalry in warfare, although horses still played an essential role in hauling material behind the lines in the First World War. As in the US, it was the replacement of the horse-drawn omnibus by the electric tram that triggered a rapid fall in horse numbers used for urban transportation. The London Omnibus Company used 16,714 horses in 1901, for example, but ran its last horse-drawn bus just ten years later(2). The decline in the horse as a source of power in agriculture was a more protracted process over several decades to the 1950s, although faster in Britain than in much of Europe. By the 1970s, the number of horses in Britain had fallen four-fifths from its late Victorian peak. Despite this collapse, horses have left their imprint. Their ghosts are all around, yet mostly go unnoticed. In London, having shaped the city’s physical layout for several centuries, horses now stand motionless on plinths bearing dead kings and generals (and the occasional East Anglian rebel queen).
In post-war Britain, the horse morphed from a creature of war and work - of cavalries, canals and coal mines - to one principally of sport and leisure. Its demography, geography and bodily form changed too. The shrinking equine population became much more skewed to the country than the town, and the heavy draught horses of old, once the height of industrial modernity, have become acutely ‘rare breeds’. Yet the industrial and military legacy of horse-work leaves a long shadow that stretches to the present but is slowly slipping from living memory. The site of Pickfords - the haulage firm’s - London stables complex now hosts the stalls of Camden Market – the clinks of gothic nick nacks replacing those of industrial saddlery. The residual clip clop of the rag and bone man is fading into history. The last working pit ponies finished their shifts in the 1990s and the very last one, Tony, died in retirement in 2011. Queen Elizabeth II, renowned for her equestrian enthusiasms, died in 2022, her first Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, having ridden in battle on horseback in the Sudan in 1898, shooting at enemy forces with his pistol.
Horses still play a role in social control and maintaining public order. They were ridden against the miners at Orgreave in 1984, at the Poll Tax protesters in 1990, and were used to police the protest against student tuition fees outside Parliament in 2010. And they can still be seen at football matches, such as these I photographed at St James’s Park when Newcastle played the not notoriously troublesome Brentford in September 2023.
Today, there are around three quarters of a million horses in the UK, mostly owned by around 330,000 horse-owning households. Total horse numbers had grown again from the mid-1990s to around 2006, as economic growth and rising disposable incomes meant more people could afford them, and as farmers actively diversified to provide land and stabling. However, the years of austerity and the recent economic downturn mean the number of horses is falling once again - by as much as two-fifths since 2006. Hard times for the British economy mean hard times for the horse economy too. The number of riding schools has fallen from approximately 1,800 in 2018 to just under 1,500 today, a 15 per cent drop that means an estimated 1.5 million fewer riding lessons taking place(3) − fewer horses, fewer horse-owning households, and fewer riding lessons. The economic squeeze can only mean that equestrianism becomes more socially exclusive once again.
The horse economy still amounts to around £5 billion a year, and more than £8 billion if betting is included. Yet punters are more likely to bet online, via phones, than go to a racecourse or betting shop, and betting on football is replacing a flutter on the horses. Horseracing now makes headlines beyond the Racing Post because of the controversies around horse welfare. Typically, between 150 and 200 horses are put down each year after falling at racecourses, and campaigners complain about the treatment of horses in other horse-sports such as dressage too(4). The ‘social license to operate’ for horse-sport, and for the uses of horse more generally, is coming under increasing pressure.
Animal welfare concerns will shape the future uses of horses, while, at the same time, new uses emerge. Horses are increasingly deployed in equine-assisted therapy to help people with all sorts of difficulties. In a paradoxical turnaround of roles, this creature of military battles of old is now used to ease the post-traumatic stress of the military veterans of twenty-first century wars.
The horse economy remains a significant rural land use, at a time when pressures on land for food production, biodiversity and carbon sequestration grow ever stronger. Where are we going to find the 1.5 to 2 million hectares of land to accommodate all the extra trees and energy crops we will need to get to a net zero UK while maintaining food production? But only whisper these numbers. We don’t want to frighten the horses.
All photographs are copyright of the author.
Neil Ward (neil.ward@uea.ac.uk)
I’m based at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and teach on the geography programmes there. My book, Horses, Power and Place: A More-Than-Human Geography of Equine Britain, is published by Routledge (2024).
References
1. Lambert, D. (2015) Master – Horse – Slave: Mobility, Race and Power in the British West Indies, c.1780–1838, Slavery & Abolition 36, 618–641
2. Doole, M. (2020) Identification of the urban infrastructure of nineteenth-century horse transport: a case study of Worksop, Nottinghamshire, UK, pp.191-206 in D. Turner (ed.) Transport and Its Place in History: Making the Connections. London: Routledge.
3. Jones, E. (2023) Riding at risk as schools close but participation slightly up, Horse & Hound, 9 March p.4.
4. Taylor, J. (2022) ‘I Can’t Watch Anymore’: The Case for Dropping Equestrian from the Olympic Games. Copenhagen: Epona Publishing.
