ABOUT
The Horse Hospital is an artist-led, not-for-profit independent arts venue in central London.
Established in 1993 by Roger K. Burton, THH has uplifted countercultural and experimental art across music, performance, film, fashion, and visual art. It has also served as a living archive of countercultural activity and ‘outsider art.’
As of 2025, The Horse Hospital is run by The Horse Hospital Collective. This collective has been entrusted with the responsibility of continuing, expanding upon and reaffirming The Horse Hospital’s originating vision, with a renewed focus on providing a home for DIY cultural practices.
The THH Collective’s internally-directed programme runs concurrently with usage of the space by wider communities through our Open Access scheme, as well as provision through direct hire.
The Horse Hospital is supported first and foremost by the large community of artists, audiences, fans, and friends who use and cherish the space. As of 2025, support from friends Untitled Experiment additionally enables us to maintain our mission.
Mission
To foster the broadest possible access to producing and consuming art and culture in whatever form it takes among those who share our values.
To promote and support under-represented and marginalised practitioners, irrespective of financial means or cultural capital.
To both encourage and actively facilitate experimentation and risk-taking through our programming practices and in our provision of practical support additionally to our physical venue as a resource.
To celebrate the DIY, the counter-cultural, the outsider, the unfashionable.
To reject professionalism, strategy, power and selling out. To reject the marketisation of culture on the terms of the elite.
To actively support the creation and sustenance of counter-narratives, ‘invisible’ underground cultures & publics.
To serve, nurture and invest in the communities that form around the above practices, both within and outside our walls.
PEOPLE
As of 2025, The Horse Hospital is programmed and run by The Horse Hospital Collective, consisting of:
George Lynch
Alex McKenzie
Luisa D. Rozo
Board of directors:
Roger K. Burton
Tai Shani
Mark Pilkington
Stephen Coates
Stevie Bennett
Alexia Marmara
George Lynch
Founder: Roger K. Burton
Exhibitions curator: Alexia Marmara
Archive assistant: Liberty McAnena
HISTORY
The Horse Hospital is among the longest-running experimental arts spaces of its kind in London. Roger K. Burton initially founded The Horse Hospital in 1992, and the venue opened its doors in 1993 with Vive Le Punk!, a retrospective exhibition of Vivienne Westwood’s punk designs. Our historic building was originally built by James Burton in 1797 as stabling for cab drivers’ sick horses. The Horse Hospital is Grade-II National Heritage listed.
Since its founding, thousands of practitioners and collectives have contributed to The Horse Hospital’s history. Among them are Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren, Joe Coleman, Gee Vaucher, Lydia Lunch, Throbbing Gristle, John Balance, Mark Leckey, Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Toop, Jamie Reid, Thurston Moore, Ron Athey, Banksy, Yvonne Rainer, Nan Goldin, Anita Pallenberg, Iain Sinclair, Eve Libertine, Gavin Bryars, Slava Polunin, William English, among many, many others.
A Note from Alan Moore
“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
The Building
The only existing unspoilt example of a two-floor, purpose-built stable remaining for public access in London.
Situated in the heart of historic Bloomsbury, at the corner of Herbrand Street and Colonnade – a working mews immediately behind the famous Hotel Russell, midway between London’s West End and Spitalfields arts district and built originally in 1797 by James Burton, the building may have been redeveloped sometime after 1860.
The shell is constructed with London Stocks and red brick detail, whilst the interior features a mock cobbled herringbone pattern re-enforced concrete floor. Access to the both floors is by concrete moulded ramps. The upper floor ramp retains hardwood slats preventing the horses from slipping. Each floor has five cast iron pillars and several original iron tethering rings.
Donate
We are seeking support for our ongoing programming – all donations welcome!