72 Replies to “London, 1903”

  2. Except for the constant smell of horse shit, it certainly looks like a more civil society that what they have now. I didn’t see one turban in that entire clip. How pleasant is that?

  3. Am surprised at all the advertising on the horse drawn buggy’s and that I recognize some:
    Kodak, Lipton Teas and Nestles Milk.

  4. …the constant smell of horse shit…
    Ah the odour of nostalgia; the city of Regina had horse drawn milk wagons until 1959. Bread wagons too until about 1955.

  6. I love these movies depicting our carbon free future. Makes me want to go out and slap a carbon tax on everything that moves,grows,eats,farts or otherwise is based on carbon…sigh..it is going to be so great.
    Sarcasm is sweet confort in a world gone mad.

  7. horse shit and soot from coal heat. i lived with coal heat for many years. it was great when oil came along.

  8. The traffic kind of reminds me of taxi cabs in Manhatten. Kind of wild.

  10. I’m amazed at the ‘apparent’ pandemonium.
    I say apparent because with all that traffic there seem to be no red lights, no specific crosswalks, no traffic jams.Jay-walking was the norm.
    Could it be that left on our own without an abundance of laws and bannings and restrictions …people could thrive and survive?
    Heh…looks like no speed limit for the horses either.

  11. bluetech – Details are fuzzy as I didn’t pay a lot of attention, but a few weeks back, there was something on the news about a town (in Holland maybe) where the stop signs were removed and replaced with a sign that indicated this was an uncontrolled intersection. Collisions dropped because people had to fend for themselves and so started paying attention to other cars. Whoda thunk it?

  12. Horseshit and steam power. Amazing snippet to a bygone era. Thought i saw Holmes chasing Moriarity for a sec.

  13. Another horseless carriage at 2:46. Still in its infancy at that time.
    Fascinating footage.

  16. Very cool.
    Steam is always associated with the 18th and 19th century but did provide most transportation up until the second world war and most of the electricity even now. ( dont tell the greens, they thing comes out of the air)
    Our shallow transportation history still manifests itself in the word Horsepower.
    even the greens cant speak of KW ratings for their battery cars.

  18. Kathryn, that reminds me of all-way stop signs. They definitely make folks pay attention and let the first-to-arrive go first. It’s better than situations with one side with a stop sign, another without any sign and another side with a yield sign. It’s utter confusion, as folks don’t know what kind of sign the others have, don’t realize that they can just keep going if they get no sign at all… and so on.
    Recently in Halifax, with blackouts and many intersections’ stoplights out on Christmas Eve, guess what? No accidents to see, despite the heavy, heavy-traffic situation… people still really, really knew what to do without the direction of the stoplights!
    I did break a wheel and blow a tire on a big-surprise-WTF-who-put-it-THERE (all I did was read a street sign and BAM!) median in Halifax recently, though, indicating that the streets of Halifax were designed by an idiot.
    The pictures at the link, by the way, bear a striking resemblance to much of the old central areas of Saint John, NB, with its many, many awesome-to-behold-especially-if-you’re-not-local ancient buildings still alive and housing businesses and tenants. And they still have tourist-impressing horsey trolleys in summer (I know the owners), though the horses wear crap-catching pouches under their asses now, so you don’t have to drive through horseshit and splatter it onto pedestrians.

  20. I don’t know about traffic accidents on the streets, but I did an essay in school one time about railway safety – I recall there were 6000 people killed in railway accidents of one sort or another in Britain in one year in the 1880s. Some good old days really weren’t all that good.

  21. Transportation has always evolved to the more people mass=the more effect:efficient method of getting people to destination.

  22. Gord, there probably weren’t any mosques back then ’cause, really, most Muslims were, well, living in tents and riding camels in the desert or something, far, far, far away… as I figure, anyway.

  23. You also see the beginnings of double decker buses. Lot’s of people sitting in chairs on top of the carriages.

  27. Men with hats, dress shirts, ties, jackets.
    Co-incidentally, I was saying to my wife over the dinner last night — seated by a window viewing all the grubby cell&iPod addicted proletarian-pedestrians — that I was seriously considering abandoning my fairly recently adopted quasi-proletarian look (tho’ the “designer jeans” cost about $250) and returning to a more upscale casual look.
    I bought my first pair of jeans 10 years ago for $39 from Mark’s Work Wearhouse at the beginning of my motorcycle riding career. Those of course, under the exacting tutelage of my very discerning wife, gradually morphed into “designer jeans” which, despite the price tag, have the obligatory tat especially at the bottom.
    That’s what I experience every time I see those old reels: what a grubby lot we’ve become, and how seedy everthing looks to me now, notwithstanding the disappearance of horseshit, tho not bullshit.

  28. The Capital of the Empire, arguably one of the most advanced & modern cities inthe world at the time.
    Just barely 100 years ago.
    The nice thing about the horsedrawn transport, ( I know, horseshit, in kilotonnes) was the humane scale and speed of everything.
    And to the guy who said 1000’s of train accidents, remember how many car accidents we have now, one evil for another. (And let’s not forget the horse vs human accidents, I’ll bet there were 10,000’s of horse accidents a year, feet stepped upon, faces kicked, neck broken falling off. Horses are dangerous.)

  29. Horse shit everywhere, it’s more than just a dream for some. Looks more efficient than the TTC.

  30. Environmental activists must have been concerned about a manure problem that could only get worse as the population, and therefore the need for horses, increased. The alternatives then, as now, must have been grim. Either stop having children or get out of that carriage and walk. Otherwise, by 1925, London is under a 3-foot blanket of horse manure.

  31. It must have been wonderful to be a Englishman in 1903.
    Not so wonderful now.
    It was wonderful to be an American in 1950, when the USA held a similar position to England in 1903.
    Not so wonderful now.

  32. The street surface looks very smooth in the video. What do you suppose it was built from? It doesn’t look like cobblestone.
    It also looks surprisingly manure-free. Back in the day, they probably didn’t over-feed their horses like today’s parade horses. Or, maybe the video was shot right after a sweeping.

  33. Don’t foget to take in London’s “Big Polar Bear”, courtesy of Sir WattsUpWithThat*.
    2 views here for your delecatlinshun:
    *urlm.in/cjta
    *urlm.in/cjtd

  34. Don’t laugh – Orion Magazine takes horse power seriously !
    [Why then did the beautiful world of my childhood collapse? The reasons most frequently given for converting to tractor power were the cost of feed, convenience, and ease. But more likely it was simply the ethos of the age. Social philosopher Lewis Mumford wrote in 1933 of the “religion” of the machine, which for two centuries had driven society “toward mechanical development without regard for the actual outcome of the development in human relations themselves.”
    One thing is certain. Horses were not abandoned because they were no longer up to the job. There seems no reason to suppose that horses could not again till the acres they tilled earlier, were the considerations only technical.] Orion
    Technical ? Like manure mountains ? Pollution ? Horrendously expensive food ?

  35. Actually, it would have been the smell of coal … until about 1985, the aroma of coal fires was very noticeable in Britain. Laws enforcing cleaner burning coal and a widespread switch to natural gas ended that era, but when I used to visit the UK in those days, the aroma of coal was everywhere. It’s not vastly different from the aroma you find on Commercial Drive in Vancouver nowadays.

  36. Orion is dreaming a flower child fantasy.
    These figures are uneducated quesses, but sane.
    1 man 1 horse = 5acres = mass starvation worldwide.
    1 man 1 tractor = 50 acres. = Ability to feed entire world for the first time in history.

  38. Yep lots of horse dung. Although there was a trade where men in wagons would ply the streets scooping up the crap to sell as fertilizer, what was left was washed into the rivers causing frequent cholera outbreaks in selected neighbourhoods (eg the poor ones near the docklands). Better to die of lung cancer from automobile tailpipe fumes at 75 years than cholera at age 5.

  40. That was fun! All the humans were fending for themselves, crossing the road, and I guess there’d be no point in blaming anyone else if you got hit by a horse and wagon — “It’s not my fault!” “It’s his fault!” “He made me do it!” a la the wronged party circa 2009 — because the judge would just say, “You idiot! You should have just got out of the way! Case dismissed.”
    By all means, MND, return to “a more upscale casual look” and, while you’re at it, could you persuade the women you know to do the same thing?
    I’m out on the street a lot, in the subways and on streetcars, and can’t believe how skanky and ugly too many women, young and old, look these days.
    Whoever’s designing the clothes, I’m convinced, hates women, they’re so ugly. Too many look like horses’ a**es — whereas the real McCoy hitched to these wagons look great.

  41. i grew the most amazing tomatoes with horse manure as fertilizer.+weeds

  42. dp at 02:30: “It also looks surprisingly manure-free. Back in the day, they probably didn’t over-feed their horses like today’s parade horses. Or, maybe the video was shot right after a sweeping.”
    I think what appears to be a white paved street is probably Horse S**it. In the old days they used cow dung to make a sort of pavement for their cabin floors. Mix HS, water and dirt into a pasty consistency spread and then dry (happens naturally in the streets). Like pavement and the clouds of dust you see in the early part of the video is guess what? Great for the asthma!

  43. my dog used to body surf in fresh horse chit when he first moved here, but hater the bath afterwards, so after about 6 surf and bath routines he learned that no surfing meant no bath
    damn jackass russells are smart dogs:-)))))

  44. I just chanced to see this post and spent quite a time on it. This plus the great still shots. My liberal (read NDP member spouse) finally got to sit down and view something on SDA. She from West London and me from what is now North West London.
    We remarked on the landmarks- St Martin’s In The Fields, Big Ben, way off St Pauls Cathedral, National Gallery etc. Noticed the beer crates on the conveyance.
    How those people crossed and recrossed is amazing. I do know that being run over by an Omnibus was a well know fate at the time.
    Not to glamourise that era, indeed the best way is to view it as something that existed and is now gone. All those people and thinking life was so important- which it was.
    The Charles Booth enquiries and other sociological excursions into Edwardian and previously Victorian London, tell us quite a lot.
    Heres to the human spirit anyway, one has to “get on” as we were exhorted to do.
    Great stuff, and I will invite my London friends over for a Guinness or two, far off in lovely Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. A home from home.

  45. Fascinating footage, and photos at the blog. There did seem to be a greater sense of public decor and propriety in that age.
    From my readings of the history the horse manure indeed was a huge problem. The automobile was seen at the time as a solution to an enormous urban pollution problem. If I’m not mistaken, horses were often required to wear a bag that caught the manure, but despite that there was still plenty of spillage and large numbers of men were employed cleaning up the leftovers. In other locales, men with brooms stood on the street corners and hired themselves out to the more well-heeled to sweep a path across the street.
    As for accidents, horse and carriage transport certainly wasn’t perceived as being particularly safe. Apart from horse/carriage vs pedestrian (Mme Curie’s husband died thusly) single carriage rollovers with runaway horses etc. were a significant risk.
    That being said, the cityscape of that era has an undeniable charm — perhaps the more so when viewed from the wealth, comfort and convenience of our modern lives

  46. Lots of employment scooping up the horse apples.
    Maybe this is what they mean by more jobs threw a carbon tax.

  47. kathyrn refers to Dutch experience with removing traffic signs, and so on. This is Hans Monderman’s “Shared Space” – good article on Wikipedia bout him, plus there are vids on YouTube of Monderman’s principles in action. By the way, Winnipeg’s traffic engineers are finally adopting roundabouts, about bloody time. I noticed that auto at 2:10 also, looks like it could be an electric. Great video – and it wasn’t the horse apples that were the problem then so much as the resulting ‘horse dust,’ good for TB among other things.

  48. Today’s sterile skyscrapers and 12 lane highways don’t hold a candle to the streetscape in this clip.

  49. Apart from the huge manure problem, disposal of horse carcases was a major headache. In a city like London, there would be thousands of horses dying each year from old age/injury or put down because they were unable to work.
    I seem to remember reading about huge dumps outside large American cities where the dead horses were left.
    Imagine the smell and the flies!

  50. How many thousands of tons of horseshit had to be removed every week? … An environmental and health problem that has been eliminated by the internal combustion engine.

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