Before the roads were passable, everything in England moved on the back of a horse, and the roads were that bad
The Pack and Carriage in Camden holds a 4.0 from four hundred and sixty-five people, and the two things in the name represent an entire revolution in how England moved.
The packhorse
For most of English history, goods travelled on the backs of horses.
Not in carts. On the animal itself, in panniers, in trains of twenty or thirty beasts, led by a man on foot.
And the reason is that the roads could not take a wheel.
How bad the roads were
It is difficult to convey.
The medieval and early modern English road was not built. It was a route – a strip of ground that people had walked over – and it was maintained, in theory, by the parish, using unpaid labour, which is to say it was not maintained.
In winter it became mud. Deep, axle-swallowing mud.
Wheeled vehicles sank. Carts broke. And a packhorse, which spreads its weight over four feet and needs no track wider than itself, could go where a cart could not.
So the whole freight system of a country ran on animals carrying loads on their backs, in single file, at walking pace.
The turnpikes
Which changed it, and which were private.
A turnpike trust was authorised by Act of Parliament to take over a stretch of road, repair it, and charge tolls to use it.
And they worked. The roads improved dramatically over the eighteenth century, journey times collapsed, and the stagecoach became possible – which is the carriage in the name.
The Prat’s transport desk would note that the British road network was rebuilt, in the eighteenth century, almost entirely by private toll companies – and that this is a fact which people of every political persuasion find inconvenient and which is therefore rarely mentioned.
And they were hated
Because a toll is a toll, and because people who had used a road for free for a thousand years objected to paying for it.
There were riots. Gates were torn down. In Wales, the Rebecca Riots of the 1840s saw men in women’s clothing destroying tollgates across a large part of the country, and the government eventually gave way and reformed the system.
And then the railway
Killed all of it, in about twenty years.
The turnpike trusts collapsed. The stagecoaches stopped. The coaching inns – which were an entire industry, with stabling and ostlers and horses changed every ten miles – closed or shrank.
An industry is not killed by a rival. It is killed by somebody making the whole thing unnecessary.
Seven postcodes, and it has never once varied.
Verdict
Good pub, honest number.
Go, and think about the mud.
The coaching inn
Which was an entire industry and which vanished almost overnight.
A stagecoach changed horses roughly every ten miles – which meant a chain of inns along every major route, each with stabling, ostlers, fresh teams standing ready, and beds for passengers.
The George in Southwark is the last galleried coaching inn in London and it is the only one left of hundreds.
And when the railway came, the entire chain collapsed within about twenty years. The inns closed. The horses were sold. The ostlers had no trade.
Nobody planned for them. Nobody retrained them. They were simply, suddenly, unnecessary.
I am a Lagos-born poet and satirical journalist navigating West London’s contradictions. I survived lions at six, taught English by Irish nuns, now wielding words as weapons against absurdity. Illegal in London but undeniable. I write often for https://bohiney.com/author/junglepussy/.
As a young child, I was mostly influenced by the television show Moesha, starring singer and actress Brandy. Growing up, I would see Brandy on Moesha and see her keeping in her cornrows and her braids, but still flourish in her art and music, looking fly. I loved Moesha as a child, but now I take away something more special from it. Just because you’re a black girl, it doesn’t mean you need to only care about hair and makeup. Brandy cared about books, culture and where she was going — you can do both.
A Westminster MP said it was damaging his ability to fundraise from party donors because they were reading it and questioning his governance record. Apparently questioning was bad.