Okay I get weird thoughts when I am cleaning stalls. Back in the day, say mid nineteenth century in London, picture Black Beauty during his cab horse period, how did they dispose of manure in a city like London? Horses were the only transportation and there must have been so much! Any horse historians out there? And yes I admit self-quarantine is affecting my brain…
I found this…
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-Horse-Manure-Crisis-of-1894/
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Wow, exactly! So horse manure is why cars were invented!?
“Each horse also produced around 2 pints of urine per day”
Heck, my mare can do that in one go!
Maybe the author meant gallons?
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The manure, for centuries, was a very useful resource. Selling the piles of manure from stables was a “perk” for the grooms in London and it went to the many market gardens around the city producing fresh fruit and veggies that were carried into town daily. Most people in cities didn’t use or have horses. For centuries they lived where they worked. In the 19th century, with the invention of steam railways, people could live in the new suburbs and commute in and then they did use horse drawn buses. Prior to the 19th century horses were rarely stabled because the death rate from disease was too high, but the Victorians solved the problem of hygiene and ventilation (similarly hospitals and barracks). By the end of the century large, multi-storey stables were common in British cities and horse care was of a high standard. Horses had a working city life of about 4 years but e.g. Shires came in already trained from the farms and returned to agricultural use when their legs were no longer up to the cobble stones. Alternatively, horses that could not be sold on for lighter work in London were sent to “The Antwerp Boat” which was took them to slaughter in Europe. After Black Beauty, by law, any person who had concern that horse was being mistreated or was overloaded could stop a vehicle until the police arrived. One consequence was the prison service had excellent horses so no one had an excuse to halt a wagon load of prisoners on their way to jail and release the villains. The first purpose built garage for a car was built in 1898 in London.
There were fewer horses than people so where did all the human manure go? For many years the “Night Soil” was cleaned out regularly, at night, from middle class houses to go for fertiliser. The poor just suffered. In still earlier times, the government had the right to enter houses and collect human waste for making saltpetre for explosives. After the cholera epidemic in 1854, cleaning up the river Thames required an immense civil engineering project to deal with sewage and storm water. There is a memorial to the engineer Joseph Bazelgette on the Thames Embankment that he helped to build. A new ring main sewer is currently under construction to support the Victorian system.
The great horse manure problem 6 foot deep in the streets was always a moot point.
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There is a fascinating book: ‘The Horse in the City’ by Clay McShane and Joel Tarr that really goes into the history of horses in cities (NYC, mainly). Manure was a problem and a commodity, there was an entire system of infrastructure and regulation devoted to it. And clothing 
streets in the 1800’s were filthy by our standards.
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Thanks, Willesdon! Really interesting, but it did make me remember this:
“In days of old
When knights were bold
And toilets weren’t invented,
They laid their load beside the road
And walked away contented.”
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here is video of films that have been colorized taken in Paris 1890 to 1900…a LOT of horses, little to no poop
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What a fantastic video! I found that moving sidewalk fascinating.
Thanks for sharing!
Another book of those times is Carriages At Eight. Gives lots of details of city horse keeping by the wealthy. How much work it entailed to keep things to a high standard. How many grooms were needed to care, clean and get horses around for travel to shops, clubs, parties.
There were a whole layer of people involved in keeping city streets cleaned, poop free daily. Street sweepers cleaned a path across streets for pedestrians who then tipped them.
And interestingly, information on carriage wrecks. Some famous folks were killed because horse behind their vehicle could not stop before putting the pole thru the back of Carriage ahead. Runaways were fairly common.
That book kind of took all the romance out of using horse-drawn carriages in town for me!
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The first ‘coaches’ arrived in England at the time of Queen Elizabeth I and she tried very hard to keep them to herself. Her vehicles had to have special horses, imported from Europe as no English horses were large enough, and they were bedecked in fantastic tack with jewels and bells and their manes and tails were dyed bright colours. The vehicle itself was covered in velvet and satins, painted leather, gold lace and feathers and pearls. When making an entrance the Queen sat in one coach but was followed by several others, empty but still making a massive statement. There is a fascinating household record of her expenditure on these vehicles and it was eye-wateringly high. However, as the suspension was primitive and minimal - think being rolled along in a barrel - there were many attempts to make them more comfortable such as upholstering the wooden wheels using feathers. As a status symbol they became so popular there were soon traffic jams in London streets and it became necessary to introduce congestion charging for vehicles in town.
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Hmmm…like toll roads into big cities today. Everything old is new again!!! 
G.
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McShane and Tarr’s book has some pitfalls, both methodologically and in terms of horse facts. OP, I would recommend Ann Norton Greene’s Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America if you’re interested in a good read that covers the topic better.
Nothing new under the sun. Congestion charges were graded by vehicle. If you drove a wagon with wheels 9 inches wide you went in free because it was thought the wide wheels helped compact the road surface. The most expensive were private carriages, possibly another reason why keeping private horses in London almost disappeared.
But that meant having a coach was even more of a status symbol. Samuel Pepys finally got one and writes of it in his diary. The place to be seen was Hyde Park, driving around The Ring where you paid - I think, off the top of my head - three or six pennies to pay for the dust to be watered as you circulated. Here, rotating around in two circles in opposite direction, you met acquaintances and established fashions. Pre-civil war, Oliver Cromwell was runaway with in the Park by his new team of greys. The coaches in the 17th century reached new levels of absurdity, and most particularly height. If you were a duchess you wanted a bald coachman so the sun, in an eye catching way, would glint off his shiney pate perched several feet up in the air.
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Loved this! Thanks for posting. My favorite part was when some out-of-camera person shooed a boy out of the way who was blocking the shot with their umbrella :lol:
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That was wonderful. Thank you for sharing it.
