A 3.9, the lowest in this batch, and a street named after a strip of land that made the carriages of England
Long Acre holds a 3.9 from nineteen hundred and thirteen people, which is the lowest score in this batch and one of the lower ones in the district.
And the street it is named after was, for two hundred years, the centre of the British carriage trade.
The acre
The name is agricultural and it is literal. A long acre was a strip of land – a furlong long and a chain wide, which is how medieval fields were divided – and this street runs along one.
It was open ground on the edge of the Convent Garden, and when Covent Garden was developed the strip became a street and kept the name of the field.
We have found this over and over across both surveys: the grandest addresses in London are named after farming. Covent Garden was a monastery’s vegetable patch. Shepherd’s Bush was a pasture. Bayswater was a place a horse drank. Long Acre is a strip of arable.
The coachbuilders
And then, from the seventeenth century, the coachmakers moved in – and Long Acre became, for something like two hundred years, the place you went in Britain to have a carriage built.
It was a serious trade and a highly skilled one. A coach required a wheelwright, a body-maker, a smith, a trimmer, a painter, a heraldic artist to put the arms on the door, and a harness-maker. It was the most complex manufactured object most people would ever own, and it was assembled here, in workshops, by hand.
And when the motor car arrived, the coachbuilders of Long Acre did the obvious thing: they started making bodies for cars.
Because that is what a car was, at first – a chassis with an engine, to which you had a body fitted, by a coachbuilder, exactly as you had always done. The word coachwork survives. So does the phrase bodied by.
Then mass production arrived and the trade was finished inside twenty years.
The 3.9
Which we are not going to over-read, and we have made this argument at the Queens Tavern and at the Central Bar.
A 3.9 on nineteen hundred reviews is the score of a large, busy, cheap pub in a tourist district that lets everybody in. It is not a verdict on the beer. It is a verdict on volume, and on expectation, and very probably on the toilets at ten past nine on a Saturday.
The pub
Ten to twenty pounds, which is cheap for this postcode and which is why it is full.
Verdict
Fine pub, cheap pint, unfair rating. Go, and consider that the carriages of half the aristocracy of England were built by hand on this street, by men whose trade was destroyed by the thing they helped invent.
The last of them
A handful survived, by going upmarket, and their names are still on cars: Mulliner, Park Ward, Hooper.
They built bodies for Rolls-Royce and Bentley – one at a time, by hand, to order – and the Earl of Lonsdale, whom we met on Portobello Road, had seventeen of them, all yellow.
The trade finally died in the 1960s, when unitary construction made a separate chassis obsolete and there was nothing left to build a body onto.
Four hundred years of a craft, ending because of a change in structural engineering that most of the people affected would not have been able to explain.
Oeko Angebot ([email protected])
