Create your own Classic English Tack Room from our authentic tack room fittings and lovely equestrian antiques. We have everything to transform your tack room from saddle horses and saddle racks to bridle racks, handsome trunks and fascinating equestrian antiques.
The Classic English Tack Room captures a moment in history...the Victorian tack room of the 1800's.
We’re especially proud that our tack room fittings have been authenticated by The Royal Mews, the Queen’s stables at Buckingham Palace. The Cheltenham saddle rack together with The Lancaster and Richmond bridle racks are created from wrought iron and English oak by English craftsmen who treasure traditional materials and methods of production. The mighty English oak also lends its strength and character to the splendid Windsor saddle horse. These magnificent fixtures and fittings will fill your tack room with a sense of history as you step into an era that cherished a time when the horse was king.
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“Work started in the stables at 5 a.m. in the summer and 6 a.m. in the winter so that the head coachman, after having a late breakfast at 10 a.m., could report at the big house to receive the orders of the day, confident in the knowledge that he could turn out well-groomed horses and immaculate carriages, without a speck of dirt inside or outside, within twenty minutes of his master’s or mistress’s command. Before he had his breakfast the stables had to be cleaned, the horse had to be groomed and fed, and the carriages and harnesses had to be polished. The coachman usually groomed the carriage horses, while the groom looked after the riding horses. Each horse was thoroughly cleaned from the tip of its ears to the soles of its feet to free its skin of all accumulated scurf, dirt and sweat. The ears were gently massaged for a few minutes until they were warm and then wiped out with a damp sponge; the hooves were washed and the dirt picked out before they were anointed in Victorian times with a mixture of oil and lamp black in the mistaken belief that it would increase the growth of the horn. The whole process took about one-and-a-half hours and at the end of it the master expected the coat to be so clean that it would not “soil a cambric handkerchief”.
Excerpt from ‘Carriages at Eight’ by Frank E Huggett.
Published by Charles Scribner’s Sons 1979
