Vehicle    From 1834 

Hansom cab

Categories: Transport

Invented and patented by Joseph Hansom. This horse-drawn carriage, or cabriolet, had larger wheels and a lower cab,with the driver sitting behind, giving it greater stability and increased speed, with safety. Small and light it required just one horse and was ideal for London's crowded streets. Its popularity spread across Europe and to the US.

In his 1875 ‘The Way We Live Now’ Anthony Trollope describes an assignation reluctantly attended by Paul Montague, who travels there by Hansom cab:

“How quick that cab went! Nothing ever goes so quick as a Hansom cab when a man starts for a dinner-party a little too early; - nothing so slow when he starts too late. Of all cabs this, surely, was the quickest. Paul was lodging in Suffolk Street, close to Pall Mall, - whence the way to Islington, across Oxford Street, across Tottenham Court Road, across numerous squares north-east of the Museum, seems to be long. The end of Goswell Road is the outside of the world in that direction, and Islington is beyond the end of Goswell Road. And yet that Hansom cab was there before Paul Montague had been able to arrange the words with which he would begin the interview. … Paul .. paid the cabman, - giving the man half-a-crown, and asking for no change in his agony….” (p.371-2, vol.1, Penguin 2001)

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This section lists the memorials where the subject on this page is commemorated:
Hansom cab

Commemorated ati

Joseph Hansom

Joseph Aloysius Hansom, 1803 - 1882, architect, founder-editor of The Builder...

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Other Subjects

Joseph Aloysius Hansom

Joseph Aloysius Hansom

Architect, founder/editor of The Builder and inventor of the Hansom cab.  Born York as Josephus Aloysius Handsom(e) into a Roman Catholic family.   Made a habit of snatching failure from the jaws o...

Person, Architecture, Transport

1 memorial
Croydon Road Recreation Ground

Croydon Road Recreation Ground

The land was purchased by the Beckenham Local Board to provide a public open space which had been lacking since the loss of the Fair Field for housing in the 1870s. The site was part of open farmla...

Place, Gardens / Agriculture, Transport

1 memorial
Henry Ford

Henry Ford

American industrialist, business magnate, founder of the Ford Motor Company, and chief developer of the assembly line technique of mass production. By creating the first automobile that middle-clas...

Person, Commerce, Industry, Race Issues, Seriously Famous, Transport

1 memorial
Barbara Harmer

Barbara Harmer

The first qualified female supersonic pilot and the first to fly Concorde. Born at the house with the plaque, she was raised in Bognor Regis and left school aged 15 to become a hairdresser but the...

Person, Gender Issues, Transport

1 memorial