There’s not another venue like it on the planet.
The Horse Hospital, crouched there in Bloomsbury on Colonnade’s chopped-off corner since the 18th century, engulfs the visitor on entry in its cask-aged atmospherics, otherworldly and unique. Adjusting psychologically to gentle gradients where stairs had been expected, a bipedal modern clientele descends into the building’s clattering history amongst the steaming ghosts of carriage-horses, tired and worn out, hackneyed, to an exhibition and performance space that is anything but.
Anachronistic and outside of time, steeped in a hundred years of horseflesh with the past only a layer of paint away, the structure is a foundry where futurity is smelted; wherein artists and performers at the razor edge of their respective disciplines display their snorting steeds before an audience eager to examine teeth and study form.
The roster of talents associated with the place is an essential résumé of counterculture, both English and global, with all this surmounted by the most exciting archive of modern street-fashion anywhere in London. Boiling everything electrifying in the city’s subterranean culture down to an exquisite bouillon, the Horse Hospital is an enormously important strand in the artistic fabric of our current century that must not be cut short, a redbrick Pegasus for which the knacker’s yard must surely be unthinkable.
In a society where all humane and beautiful alternatives are being systematically removed, evaporating from the map, it’s vitally important that we fight for, and stand up for, every inch.
Defend the Horse Hospital, so that it can take in all our hobbling and footsore arts, to make them fit and well.
—Alan Moore, March 2020