The Gondola of the Strand
“Keb, sir?”
It was a hansom! I had seen it before in daylight some days previously. I remembered that a man sitting in front of me on the top of an omnibus had turned to look at it, and had made some remark about it to a friend. A hansom! Once king of the London streets, once the gondola of the Strand, and now… there it stood beside the kerbstones with its queer air of being wrong way up, a sedan chair slung between two huge wheels, the horse glooming in the collar, the driver sitting perilously at the back, with his long whip in a metal slot near his right hand.
“Keb, sir?”
This was the wonderful HV Morton, writing in the 1930s, about possibly the last hansom cab in London.
Hansom cabs were ubiquitous on our streets between the late 1830s through to the early 20th Century when the combustion engine sealed the fate of all horse-drawn transport. The cab was designed and patented in 1834 by Joseph Hansom (1803 – 1882). He sold his patent for £10,000, but was never paid, one of a litany of business failures which dogged the Yorkshire architect throughout his career. Hansom’s idea was to design a safer mode of public vehicle for hire and he came up with what at first must have seemed a bizarre configuration of passengers in the front with the driver sat behind, high above his clients. Cabbie and fare communicated with each other through a hatch in the roof of the cab.
A major tourist attraction in the world’s great cities – Paris, New York, Rome – is to take a carriage ride around town. What a shame we don’t do this in London with hansoms. Instead, all we have are those rather dangerous looking rickshaw-tricycles, more redolent of the Far East. Quite fun, no doubt, but not for me.
Very nice post Mike. Hansom cabs most elegant though I suspect in their day they were seen as utilitarian amidst a sea of horse drawn vehicles
Thanks, Ken. Yes, you are right, probably no less mundane that today’s black cabs. We like to look back through rose-tinted lenses. I wonder to what extent people moaned about them, just like today? Dodgy manoevres in traffic, price, not going south of the river or taking short distance fares. All of that.
Mike,
Have to agree over those ‘dangerous looking rickshaw-tricycles’
As tourists in London a few months ago, we were horrified by the tricycles dodging buses and heavy traffic.
Would much rather have had a ride in an old-fashioned Handsome.
Suzi
Woops- misspelled Hansom. Sorry
Suzi
I’ve often thought it would be good to see some horse-drawn hire vehicles in London. With today’s ‘green’ attitudes, why not? If not Hansoms, perhaps Landaus, which are ‘convertible’. The difficulty is procurement and stabling of the horses, which I imagine would be very pricey; however, I’m sure it would be very popular, even if just around the tourist parts. The only horse-drawn vehicles I’ve seen in London in recent years have been the small green royal carriages carrying diplomats to and from Buckingham Palace and the very occasional brewery dray, with shire horses (this last I came across in a narrow lane near Victoria, much to my surprise).
Agree the logistics could be difficult. But the takings could be lucrative. It seems to me – reading on the Sherlock Holmes museum site – and I may have this wrong – that the difficulty is Royal Parks. Realistically, these things probably should only run through parks, for safety reasons, and all the major parks in London are owned by the Crown, who seemingly will not countenance this sort of usage.
A wonderful article and a beautiful picture of a Hansom cab…
Thanks, John. I could just imagine you driving one of these, not sure how you’d listen to BBC Radio London, though!