The History Behind London's Green Cabmen's Shelters

October 26, 2023 5:54 PM

The History Behind London's Green Cabmen's Shelters. As you walk around London you may come across one of these green huts by the side of the road. They are Cabmen’s shelters and they are amazing relics of Victorian London, but also a fantastic example of living history, as many of them are still in use today.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (20 comments total)

Lovely stuff. I’ve probably passed these hundreds of times without knowing what’s inside them.
posted by Artw at 7:56 PM on October 26, 2023

I thought they might be old, unused news kiosks but it's interesting to see what they're really used for.
posted by fiercekitten at 8:19 PM on October 26, 2023

the inside still strictly for black cab license holders. Anyone however can grab a hot drink or a bacon sandwich from the hatch.


Really?
In 2023?
Wow.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 8:29 PM on October 26, 2023

Something like this would be great today for rideshare and delivery drivers, especially at night, if you could find the space. Maybe a food truck and a movie set-style bathroom trailer on the edge of a parking lot.
posted by smelendez at 12:18 AM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Chapter 16 of Joyce's Ulysses, the "Eumaus" chapter, occurs in a cabman's shelter. I never really knew what it was!
posted by Schmucko at 12:27 AM on October 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

Tom the Cabbie gives them a mention in his insider's list of 5 BEST Places to Eat in London!. Tom is prolly worth a FPP in own right.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:53 AM on October 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've been inside one of these. When I first arrived in London in 2008, I lived near the St Georges Square shelter. I was curious about what it was and asked a guy who was standing right outside. He told me it was a cabmens shelter and showed me in. I asked some dumb questions (Is this a cafe? Who runs this place?) He was very patient although some guys inside were giving me funny looks.

...still strictly for black cab license holders.

This seems to be repeated everywhere but has this always been true? I know Ulysses is no basis for facts but in the Dublin shelter, the whole world seems to be inside one of these. Like most things in London I am betting this was something that only changed in the past few decades but everyone puts down to ancient tradition.
posted by vacapinta at 1:57 AM on October 27, 2023

Really?
In 2023?
Wow.

Just to be clear, "Black Cab Driver" refers to the traditional colour of the cabs, and not anything else.
posted by Optamystic at 3:12 AM on October 27, 2023 [13 favorites]

My first thought was for the horses - the cabmen got to go inside to keep warm, did they? And the poor horses got to stand outside in the sleet?

Info about black cabs.

The interesting thing about the black cabs was the test a license holder had to pass before they could get the permit. They test is referred to as The Knowledge of London, and it is expected that the person taking the test spends FOUR years studying it, so that they instantly know where any given address they were given might be. The test is also so hard that around three out of four test takers fail it. When it was first introduced, many decades before GPS it was really essential.

Among other reasons, since London had swallowed up many smaller communities, there were more than thirty streets named High Street that the cab driver had to be able to find and distinguish. High Street is like the American Main Street - it was the traditional name for the main road in the original community and almost always held the primary shops. They have since done a lot of renaming and standardizing of house numbers, but since the city is anything but laid out on a grid pattern, you can see why it took a well trained professional to navigate.
posted by Jane the Brown at 3:53 AM on October 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

My first thought was for the horses - the cabmen got to go inside to keep warm, did they? And the poor horses got to stand outside in the sleet?

Humans are more vulnerable to hypothermia than horses because of surface to volume ratio.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:28 AM on October 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is a really cool little history tidbit, thanks for sharing!
posted by Harald74 at 4:36 AM on October 27, 2023

So interesting. Wouldn’t a toilet be the thing they really need? Or are there enough public toilets in London to satisfy drivers?
posted by Bunglegirl at 5:14 AM on October 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I must say I would be well pleased if delightful little green huts popped up on roads around my town, offering crispy vegan falafel and lettuce wraps with hot & sweet chill sauce, and I got change from a fiver for one. Oi oi - that’s lunch sorted again
posted by inflatablekiwi at 6:23 AM on October 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

I've heard about these from a fun Youtube channel - Korean Englishman, run by a pair of English guys. One is part Chinese and lived in China for a while as a kid, bonding with the Korean kids as fellow fish-out-of-water. He ended up studying Korean in college (in the UK) and then started the channel with his BFF to sort of introduce Korean food to the UK. So most of his videos are some kind of "[Category of person] tries [type of Korean food] for the first time" thing.

Hence: British cab drivers try Korean cab drivers' favorite meal. The cabbies mention the green cabmens' shelters, but add that there aren't as many as there used to be and that a lot of them have gone "general public".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:28 AM on October 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Something like this would be great today for rideshare and delivery drivers, especially at night, if you could find the space

NYC is working on establishing some "hubs" for delivery people with charging stations, etc. Which is great--but we should be collecting fees from the companies to do so, and it's not clear that we are.
posted by praemunire at 9:30 AM on October 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I made it clear to my gentleman caller that, as a condition of my proposed nuptialization, that the three things I needed to have in place before I'd surrender to marital status were:

• a goat
• an electric car
• a small shed for writing and musicmaking

I've given up on the goat (too escapey and high-maintenance), the electric car can wait until I find a way to smuggle a Citroën Ami EV into the US, but now I sort of want to build a not-entirely-faithful recreation of a London green cabmen's shelter as my shed.

Thanks a lot, Metafilter.
posted by sonascope at 9:43 AM on October 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

Picked up a copy of the author's book - even though I'm far from London, I'm a sucker for this kind of urban mini-history.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:05 PM on October 27, 2023

So interesting. Wouldn’t a toilet be the thing they really need? Or are there enough public toilets in London to satisfy drivers?

Maybe? Public toilets have their own rich history which would have gone from shitting in the streets around the time the shelters went up, to a well supported infrastructure of public conveniences by the early 20th century to them all getting pulled down and people going back to shitting in the street now if they can’t afford a Starbucks.
posted by Artw at 9:17 AM on October 28, 2023

The map lacks the Blackheath Tea Hut, a green cabbies' tea hut that was destroyed by a car crash and rebuilt: https://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/19533809.blackheath-tea-hut-back-dead-2020-crash/
posted by k3ninho at 4:07 PM on October 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Oh by the way, this post has been added to the Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:38 AM on November 1, 2023 [1 favorite]