City of Beasts by Thomas Almeroth-Williams;

Author:Thomas Almeroth-Williams;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The park now swarmed with riders, vehicles and gawping pedestrians. One first-time visitor from Lancashire observed: ‘The number of Carriages is truly astonishing; for the whole length of Hyde Park which, in one view, I conceive cannot be less than a Mile from three to five o’clock you may see Carriages two fold continually passing.’19 This is the equestrian paradise captured in The Entrance to Hyde Park on a Sunday, an engraving published in 1804 in the popular guidebook, Modern London (see Figure 28). Riders pack Rotten Row as far as hundreds of admiring spectators can see. In the foreground, fashionable carriages pour in and in the distance, unsaddled horses graze and frolic. The explosion of equestrian activity witnessed in this period was the catalyst for a grand scheme to equestrianise the park – by 1827, Rotten Row and the Drive had been integrated into a complete formal circuit including an Outer Ring, East, North and West Carriage Drives and the Serpentine Road.20 Despite being free to enter, Hyde Park played a key role in the commercialisation of equestrian culture because it was here that the most fashionable riders came to show off their horses, vehicles, tackle and riding apparel. At the same time, the park was the principal stage on which to demonstrate equestrian ability and from the mid-eighteenth century this was increasingly acquired in London’s public riding schools.

28John Pass after Edward Pugh, The Entrance to Hyde Park on a Sunday, engraving published in Richard Phillips, Modern London; Being the History and Present State of the British Metropolis (1804).

These institutions were considerably less decorous than many other polite venues but they were significant players in the commercialisation of leisure. In the 1750s, elite equestrians, including the tenth Earl of Pembroke, gave their patronage to continental riding masters, among whom the Frenchmen Henry Foubert, his nephew Solomon Durrell, and an Italian, Domenico Angelo, opened the city’s first public riding schools. These pioneers promoted a continental system of managed riding, or what we might loosely describe today as dressage. They were encouraged by George III, who constructed a private riding house at Buckingham House in 1763–66 and inspired the Dukes of Cumberland and Gloucester to follow suit. In 1771, Richard Berenger, the king’s gentleman of the horse, published a guide commending the manège to modern riders but he was too late, they had already moved decisively towards the ‘English Hunting Seat’, a system that promoted ease and the riding of increasingly fast horses over fences in the English countryside.21 London’s riding schools were not just swift to adapt to this transition, they took a leading role in promoting it. Newspaper adverts reveal that between 1760 and 1835, the city produced twenty-six new public riding schools. On average, these businesses advertised for twenty-seven years although the most successful did so for more than forty years. The number of schools increased without interruption from two in 1760 to thirteen in the late 1780s. There was a downturn during the Napoleonic Wars when a

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