Mission

The Horse Hospital is a three tiered progressive arts venue in London providing an encompassing umbrella for the related media of art, film, fashion, literature and music.

It provides a unique and distinctive arts and artist-led environment in which the arts can flourish for the benefit of local residents, tourists, visitors and practitioners.

As the only independent arts venue of its type in the UK, there is both a duty to aim for the broadest possible access to the arts across a broad range of artistic activity and practice and an opportunity to encourage risk, innovation and experimentation.

The building, its exhibitions and events, attract over 5000 visitors per year. Twenty-five years on and with a huge archive of rare films and access to a definitive wealth of underground artists, performance artists, filmmakers, alternative musicians, photographers, fashion designers and writers who participate in its success, The Horse Hospital is now firmly established in the London arts and fashion industries.

Prestigious organisations such as the BFI, the Hayward Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Barbican Centre, the Shishedo Gallery in Tokyo and the Brooklyn Museum of Modern Art in New York have all worked in conjunction with The Contemporary Wardrobe, The Chamber of Pop Culture and kinoKULTURE over the years giving the Horse Hospital international recognition.

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 

People

Founder: Roger K. Burton

Lead curator: Alexia Marmara

Coordinator: George Lynch

Archive assistant: Liberty McAnena

Gallery staff: Mine Kaplangi

Programming

The Horse Hospital is London’s longest running, truly independent arts venue.

We are alternative, celebrating irreverence, individualism, anti-conformism, sincerity and integrity.

Championing the outsider, the unfashionable, the other. Rejecting professionalism, strategy, power and selling out, rejecting the market, the secondary market and the homogenisation it breeds furiously. Embracing the DIY, the independent, the difficult, the intuitive, the romantic and the life affirming.