Carriage on up the West End

Should Westminster Council be taking us back in time?

Hooray! The horse-drawn cart is to make its West End comeback. Westminster Council have announced they’ll be accepting applications from sightseeing operators to manage horse-led tours through the borough’s narrow streets. Livestock haven’t been seen on the streets of Westminster for over 70 years, since they were banned to allay congestion. Well, the powers that be seem to think that the benefit to the tourist industry will outweigh road rage.

Apart from my childhood forays to Pony Club camp, my personal experience of horses extends only as far as a jaunt around the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, in one of these tourist traps (ha ha). And I must say what jolly good fun it was – sun shining down, fresh air in my face, I imagined myself as a particularly beautiful, intelligent member of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy on my way to a society ball… Well, I am only too happy to help deluded visitors to our capital fulfil their bizarre historical power fantasies. I can already see passengers in these horse-drawn vehicles slipping dreamily into the roles of Sherlock Holmes, Dickens or some bygone King or Queen. Tourists love our history, so, let’s give them a naff, olden way to get around.

So that got me thinking – why not do away with London’s motorised transport altogether? We could solve many of the city’s pollution and environmental problems in one fell swoop. As we’ve established, tourists would lap it up, thousands more Polish professionals could find menial labour as stable hands and coachmen, plus it would be great fun.

Of course, there are two sides to every coin; London would be perennially covered in horse shit (suitable fuel for a biomass power station perchance?) and the roads would be utter chaos, as cabbies tried to reacquaint themselves with a life of livestock and whips and without satellite navigation. They don’t cover everything in the Knowledge, you know. Imagine the minicab offices – dilapidated looking stables in the wrong part of town, a few nags tied up outside who really should have been put out to pasture long ago.

There’s also the problem of numbers – the city currently has two and a half million cars in circulation so an equal quantity of horses would have to be found, shoed and trained. Not to mention that every single park, garden and green space would have to be given over to stables or grazing.

So, however attractive it might sound, maybe the equestrianisation of London on a grand scale just isn’t practical. Bringing back the past just can’t work. What’s more it might start a trend: once the coach and horses revolution had gone through there could be a clamour to reinstate public hangings, the Black Death and rotten slums. That said I wouldn’t mind stopping off for a drink at a gin palace – they sound so much more glam than your common-or-garden bar, don’t they? And you never know - unknowing tourists might pay an erroneous visit, hoping to spot some royalty!

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