Where Did the Horses Come From? A Depot Disguised as a Pub

A coach travelling long distances could not use the same horses throughout, since a team pulling a loaded vehicle at speed is exhausted within around fifteen kilometres. The system therefore depended on a chain of establishments spaced accordingly along each route, each holding teams ready harnessed, so a coach arrived, swapped horses within minutes and continued while the tired team rested. Those establishments made their money from the stabling and horse hire rather than from the accommodation, and a busy one on a main route kept dozens or hundreds of horses. Passengers ate and stayed there, mail was handed over, and parcels and news were distributed, so the building served as the transport interchange of its town.

The layout follows the function and is still recognisable:

• •An archway through the street frontage, high and wide enough for a loaded coach
• •A courtyard behind, where coaches turned and were loaded
• •Stables and a hay loft around the yard
• •Galleried upper floors with rooms opening onto the yard
• •A taproom and dining rooms at the front for passengers and locals
• •An office handling bookings, parcels and mail

The mail coach service established in 1784 transformed the speed of travel and communication, and the numbers are worth stating. Coaches ran to a published timetable, carried a guard armed and equipped with a timepiece sealed so it could not be adjusted, and were exempt from tolls, which let them keep moving. Average speeds of around fifteen kilometres an hour including stops were achieved on good roads, which sounds modest and was roughly three times what had been possible fifty years earlier. London to Edinburgh fell to about forty hours. Punctuality became an expectation rather than a hope, and the coaching timetable is frequently cited as the origin of standardised time, since local time varied across the country and coaches ran on London time.

Accounts by passengers make it clear that the experience was considerably worse than the romantic image suggests. Inside seats were expensive and cramped, holding four or six people knee to knee for many hours with no possibility of stopping. Outside seats on the roof cost roughly half as much and were genuinely dangerous, exposed to weather, to low branches and to being thrown off on a corner, and deaths from exposure among outside passengers in winter are recorded. Meal stops were brief and the food notoriously bad, since a coach waited twenty minutes and the establishment had every incentive to serve slowly and charge for uneaten food. Overturning was common on poor roads. Travel sickness was general.

The collapse was among the fastest destructions of an industry on record. Railways took long-distance passengers and the mail contracts almost immediately wherever a line opened, since a train was faster, cheaper and more comfortable, and the coaching trade on a given route ended within a year or two of the railway reaching it. The main network was built between the late 1830s and the 1850s, and the long-distance coaching business was essentially finished by 1850. Enormous numbers of horses were sold, and the establishments either closed, became ordinary hotels serving a local trade, or survived by feeding railway passengers. Their buildings remain, which is why so many English town centres contain a large old inn with a wide arch leading to a yard now used for parking.

Teams pulling a loaded coach were exhausted within around fifteen kilometres, so the trade depended on a chain of establishments holding fresh horses ready, and their income came from horses rather than from beds. An archway, a yard, stables and galleried rooms are the recognisable layout. Mail coaches from 1784 reached average speeds around fifteen kilometres an hour and ran on London time. Railways destroyed the business within about fifteen years.