'A world within a world… a community with an identity, a smoothly turning cog in the wheel of royal life': A look behind the stable doors of the Royal Mews

In the autumn of 1851, editions of the Morning Post carried instructions on how to gain entry to the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace: would be visitors were invited to ‘apply by letter to Mr George Lewes for cards of admission’. The stables were open daily except Sunday, until 3pm, and admission was carefully regulated — indeed, the gate porter’s instructions were ‘to suffer no loose, idle or suspicious persons, or women of the town, to lurk or harbour near the Mews’.

Throughout its history, the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace — which, this year, celebrates its 200th anniversary — has drawn visitors from across the capital and beyond to glimpse first hand the workings of what the late Queen likened to ‘a small village, which belongs to Buckingham Palace’. Built around a large, pink-tarmac quadrangle, the Mews is a busy stables, home to a riding school, horses, carriages and cars — including some of the best-known historic carriages in the world, familiar through royal events from state visits to Royal Ascot.

It houses the men and women who work with both animals and vehicles, including blacksmiths, coachmen, chauffeurs and carriage restorers, and is the headquarters of the Crown Equerry, Col Toby Browne — the Mews’ operational head, who oversees car and carriage transport for The King. As one former employee recalled, it is ‘a world within a world… a community with an identity, rhythms and focus that are unique, a smoothly turning cog in the wheel of royal life’. Outsiders enter these busy precincts, too: Elizabeth II agreed that spare Mews stabling be offered to the Civil Service Riding Club, which provides ponies for London branches of the equestrian charity Riding for the Disabled, the beneficiaries of which, in turn, make use of the Mews riding school.

It was a grudging Parliament that, in 1822, agreed to the remodelling of Buckingham House, including the building of the new Royal Mews. The site was to be shared with the handsome riding school designed in 1765–66 by Sir William Chambers. The new king, George IV, was a spendthrift of opulent taste and capricious fancies, with an unerring instinct for flamboyant grandeur. Parliament agreed a budget for the mews of £48,565. As did most of George IV’s schemes, the project overran this sum, in this case by more than a quarter.

The King’s choice of John Nash as architect was unsurprising. In 1811, Nash had begun developing the Crown Estate of Marylebone Park and, afterwards, had reworked Henry Holland’s Royal Pavilion in Brighton, East Sussex. The Buckingham House commission, with a mews that initially included stabling for 100 horses, was to prove the architect and monarch’s last collaboration and work on the renamed Palace remained unfinished at the time of George IV’s death in 1830. The gaslit Mews, however, were completed; their external appearance much as greets today’s visitor.

Entry is via a handsome Doric arch, incongruously topped by a clock tower on which a gilded weathervane terminates in a crown finial. On the opposite side of the quadrangle, a second, matching arch leads to the ‘upper’ or back mews. In the 1840s, these provided stabling for horses belonging to Prince Albert that were not, as Queen Victoria’s carriage horses were, property of the Crown. Both arches successfully add vertical notes to a largely horizontal design, dictated by the need for a large number of similarly sized stalls for the royal horses, including two sets of state stables. Above these, Nash accommodated living quarters, lit via sash windows overlooking the quadrangle. Their attractiveness was swiftly compromised by the decision to place the inevitable muck heap nearby.

If the King was pleased with the development, which relocated royal stabling from earlier mews first established by Richard II in the vicinity of Charing Cross, those who lived and worked there were less happy. Structural problems quickly emerged. Inadequate foundations led to collapsing floors. Drainage was poor, with frequent beetle infestations of both stables and coach houses.

Nor did Nash’s plans adequately accommodate what was already a large harness collection, which subsequently continued to grow, with commissions for the coronation of William IV and a diplomatic gift from France’s Napoleon III to Queen Victoria. A number of modifications were made in the 1830s, including introducing oil lighting and Queen Victoria funded a school for the children of resident Mews employees from 1855 until the 1870s. Yet for much of the century, royal horses received a higher level of care than their handlers, although the quadrangle at one point hosted football, tennis and rounders matches among Mews families.

This has always been a community in which horses and staff coexist cheek by jowl. For the past 200 years, the tradition of ‘Mews families’ has continued, generation succeeding generation — such as the Lanes, who, in a report of 1892, were granted the accolade of largest number of years of Mews service. The then-current Lane had completed 52 years employment and lived in his Mews flat with his father, who was first employed in the royal mews at Windsor in the reign of George III.

Lane exemplified a pattern of working lives that continues. Having first been employed as a coachman, as he grew older he was assigned to less physically demanding tasks, ending as superintendent of the state carriages. Other former coachmen have ‘retired’ to work with the collections of liveries and harnesses. One result is that element of continuity valued in royal life and the maintenance of traditions facilitated by employees with long memories and extensive experience.

Much in the Mews remains as it always has been. Routines are dictated by the horses’ needs, with riding and coach horses exercised in nearby Hyde Park. Every day, as it has since 1843, a messenger coach makes short journeys to Buckingham Palace and St James’s Palace, providing an internal postal service between the two, and Mews carriages take new ambassadors and high commissioners to the Palace to present their credentials to the sovereign.

There are changes, too. Two new state coaches entered the Royal Mews collection in the late Queen’s reign: the Australian State Coach of 1988 and the Diamond Jubilee State Coach. The latter was first planned to mark Elizabeth II’s 80th birthday in 2006, although it was not completed until much later, and was first used for the State Opening of Parliament in 2014.

Today, the men and women who work in the Royal Mews maintain the high standards of royal public life — happy, as one puts it, to play their part in the great enterprise. On high days and days of ceremony, their work is gloriously showcased. At other times, theirs is a working community with an identity all its own.

In some ways, it is as tightly knit now as it was a century ago, when Twelfth Night was marked by a children’s party at which, wrote the Morning Leader: ‘In place of a Christmas tree there was a monster basket from which every child received some seasonable gift of clothing. Toys were taboo, but each lad got a Norfolk suit and each girl a warm jacket and skirt… The party opened with tea and closed with a dance.’

This article first appeared in the September 3 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here