At Chantilly 
Peter Campbell
Young’s Brewery is quitting Wandsworth. Its drays, loaded with casks and drawn by shire horses which also did a stint pulling the lord mayor’s coach, were still on the streets when we moved there in the 1960s. They won’t return. But troops of horses of the Household Cavalry, which woke us when we lived off Portobello Road, can still be encountered on their early morning journeys across London. The smell of horse announces the ambling excursions of pairs of mounted police in the streets around King’s Cross, and mounted rangers keep an eye on Wimbledon Common. There, or anywhere in the home counties which has a spare paddock or two and a bridleway, you are likely to meet strings of ponies or a lady rider who will nod down agreeably to pedestrians and offer a living illustration of de haut en bas and even of noblesse oblige.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Peter Campbell is the London Review’s resident designer and art critic.
Other articles by this contributor:
At the British Library · Peter Campbell orders a book at the new British Library
At the Wallace Collection · Osbert Lancaster’s Promontory
At the Imperial War Museum · Eric Ravilious
At Tate Britain · Peter Doig
At Tate Britain · Stanley Spencer
In the Park · John Nash stucco and Aussies with frisbees
Open House · Peter Campbell looks through other people’s windows
In Cambridge · The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West
print layout
tell a friend