Architecture

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The Horse Hospital, Camden

Twelve horse stalls with their mangers still in place, on the upper floor of a Victorian stable block now full of market stalls.

IndustrialVictorian & EdwardianYou can go insideFree

Camden Goods Depot ran on horses, and this is where they were kept. Two ranges, the western of 1882-3 and the eastern of 1897, in yellow stock brick with red brick bands and dentilled cornices, built along a sloping site against the retaining wall of the depot. The first phase held ninety-two horses over two floors and the second another forty. The wide ground-floor openings between cast-iron pilasters suggest it was designed for carts as much as for stabling.

Go upstairs. The western half of the first floor still has twelve stalls with their iron doorposts, timber boxes below the grilles and rails, and in some of them the mangers, hay racks and the remains of the wooden ventilation shafts. The brick-paved floors survive on both levels, on cast-iron columns with bell capitals carrying brick jack arches.

The name is wrong and worth knowing about. Those stalls were for resting tired or lame horses, and Historic England's judgement is that the place was unlikely to have been used for veterinary purposes at all - the name stuck because of what the stalls were for, not what was done in them.

Outside, the horse ramp still curves round the west end to reach the upper floor, and the roadway on top of the 1854 retaining wall is laid with stone setts kerbed with sleeper blocks from the first years of the railway.

Where
Stables Market, Chalk Farm Road, NW1 8AH
Nearest station
Chalk Farm · 5 min walk

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