"Walking along Gloucester Avenue in the last weeks of 2022 or first weeks of 2023 you may have found the road closed near Fitzroy Bridge. Foundations were being placed for the crane that was to lift a new span into place for the West Coast Main Line railway bridge over the Regent’s Canal after removing the corroded old western span.

Concern for the 1856 horse tunnel which ran under Gloucester Avenue and into Pickford’s Stables caused Network Rail to monitor the tunnel’s integrity during the bridge span replacement. The tunnel had been sealed on either side of the road, but the immediately neighbouring section, which forms an integral part of Michael Nadra’s restaurant, can be seen here.

The sealed tunnel section under Gloucester Avenue was opened by the contractor and revealed to be fully intact, its invert rising to about the level of the former Pickford’s stables yard, a late adaptation to the 1857 stables plan. Waterside Place, the housing development which replaced the stables complex in the early 1970s, shares a party wall along Gloucester Avenue, an archaeological curiosity from the stables era. A similar section of party wall remains on the Primrose Hill School side. Both provide essential forensic evidence in reimagining how the stables were laid out and functioned.

Anecdotal evidence has come from Peter Toms, son of a former stable master, who described growing up in the stable master’s house at No. 44 Princess Road in the late 1940s and meeting horses emerging from the horse tunnel, to give them a rub down and guide them to their stalls.  A few years earlier, in 1942, the stables had suffered major war damage from an incendiary bomb. “News came down to us one night (in the shelter in Primrose Hill) that stables nearby had been hit and the horses were running wild through the streets” (Primrose Hill Remembered). The target would have been Camden Goods Station. The hay lofts and roof trusses on the 2nd floor of the stables would have caused a merry blaze, but the horses were safely released before being rounded up later. Stable hands could shelter in the basement of the stable master’s house which had been converted under ARP measures.

But Pickford’s stables after the war were a pale imitation of their former size and architectural significance, having been  reduced from three to one or at most two storeys. While this was primarily in response to war damage, it would also have served the reduced demand for horse-drawn haulage. More than 200,000 horses were put down in the UK In 1947/1948, 40% under three years old.

Extract from:  Pickford’s Stables: a remarkable but forgotten stables complex by Peter Darley to whom thanks for permssion to reproduce.

The full article is here.