The shire horses still ploughing the fields of London deep into the 21st century

Timeless scene: horses at work at Petersham Meadows in Richmond, London, in Natasha Durlacher’s Early Morning Mowing The Meadows.

(Image credit: Natasha Durlacher)

By Annunciata Elwes

published 15 July 2024

in News

When Elizabeth II died in 2022, photographer Natasha Durlacher felt compelled to volunteer at London’s Green Park, which had been touchingly overrun with tributes of flowers, letters, candles, songs, prayers and teddy bears. Her initial task was to separate the tributes and plastic wrapping from the thousands of decaying bouquets, but she came into contact with the quiet Shire horse heroes of London’s parks and has never looked back.

‘We loaded the flowers onto a cart pulled by two beautiful Shires driven by Tom Nixon, a breed expert who then had the task of transporting the flowers in the cart to Kensington Gardens, where they were blended with leaf litter and other green waste to be composted and turned into mulch,’ she explains.

‘This compost was used to nourish London’s parks; meanwhile, we preserved as many as possible of the thousands of notes, letters and cards.’

Tom giving William and Joey a rest after a morning of harrowing at the Tower of London. ©Natasha Durlascher

She continues: ‘Through chatting to Tom, I discovered that Shire horses, the gentle giants of horse power, and the adorable-looking Clydesdales have long been used to help with the management of bracken in the parks and green spaces of London.’

Jonathan at Petersham Meadows driving William, Henri and Joey. ©Natasha Durlacher

Thus began a two-year-long photography project in which Ms Durlacher has documented the horses at work, usually in March, June or September, ‘ploughing, harrowing, reseeding, logging, rolling meadows and pasture, bracken rolling and mowing hay and wildflower meadows… restoring London’s parks’ ecosystems and improving biodiversity. I find it fascinating, calming and therapeutic to be in the company of these magnificent animals’.

Visit www.natashadurlacher.com to see more of the images, and you can follow Natasha on Instagram.

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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