The Horse Hospital, an artist-led, non-profit, Grade II-listed venue in Bloomsbury, London, has been a cherished cultural space since its inception in 1993. Eighteen months ago, it entered a new chapter when stewardship of the venue was taken over by The Horse Hospital Collective – a group of artists and musicians who are now shaping its future. For Elephant, Hatty Nestor spoke to two members of the collective, George Lynch and Alex McKenzie, about its past and present and their upcoming festival Disappearing Images (6-12th July, 2026).
Hatty Nestor: It would be great to hear about the material conditions in London that the horse hospital is trying to survive today, and the history of how it was founded.
George Lynch: The Horse Hospital was founded in 1993 by Roger K. Burton, who passed away last summer. He was from Leicester, which was a major centre of Mod culture because of its textile industry. He used to come to London in his Mod gear to sell clothes at Portobello Market. People were figuring some stuff out together, politically, personally, and the clothes were his way into that. The way he told it to me, he ended up involved in Punk because Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren met him through Portobello and he got roped into their universe by designing their shop. He was drawn into a broader countercultural world, styling and doing all sorts, moving between these different scenes in his desert boots. The Horse Hospital emerged as a byproduct of all that.
Roger wasn’t a squatter, but THH’s existence was also tied to a particular moment in King’s Cross, when the area was still derelict, and heavily squatted. It had its own place in what we now might call a cycle of gentrification. Our building at that time was cheap real estate, the stakes were low: things were set up to take particular types of risks. It couldn’t last, and it didn’t. It’s wild that we’re still here, meanwhile the frontiers of gentrification in London are spreading all the way out to Thamesmead. A lot of people really fought to keep this place. At several critical moments, some key people, like Tai Shani, Sholto Dobie, Alexia Marmara, and Letitia Calin breathed life into it when it might have faded. It’s endured through intense will and a lot of good luck. Or… good fortune. It’s become a kind of totem for multiple generations, something to wish on.
HN: After Roger stepped back at the end of 2024, The Horse Hospital shifted towards a collective structure, founded by George, Alex, and Luisa D. Rozo, with George already involved. Given the institution’s long history, could you talk about that transition?
Alex McKenzie: We wanted to do something new, but without disregarding the space’s history. I think a lot about how to carry forward the legacy of the many people who have shaped The Horse Hospital.
GL: I got involved in 2021, in the wake of the last major campaign to save The Horse Hospital. Letitia brought me in after we met at ASP Fair because I had experience in tenant organising and lease negotiations.
To begin with, working here forced me to relearn a lot. Roger challenged my assumptions about culture and politics. I came out of a left-wing cultural context that tended to treat some of the impulses of DIY Culture with suspicion. Much of what we’ve ended up doing might have been dismissed in those circles as too reckless or even individualistic. The Horse Hospital originally emerged from very specific material conditions: the ability to squat, cheaper rents, a more robust welfare state, and a broader political economy shaped in part by the Greater London Council [GLC]’s investments in grassroots culture. That context made certain kinds of cultural risk-taking possible. But Roger’s experience of it wasn’t necessarily framed in those terms. For him, DIY meant immediate, practical self-reliance: if you needed £500, you set up a stall and sold clothes. He had a strong resistance to Arts Council applications and the idea of institutional mediation. His punk background shaped a deeply sceptical relationship to the state.
That sat in tension with a later, more dominant left cultural position, influenced by post-GLC thinking, which assumed the state should actively support and fund counterculture. Roger’s view was: that’s not how this works. He was defensive of the importance of getting stuff wrong. He was impatient with art that expressed its politics in the form of ‘correct’ answers or solutions. I understood it as: you can’t plan what use you might be, what anyone else can take from what you know, from your experience. He wanted people to tell the truth and then have a fight if two truths clashed, and see what might happen. I think he was right, but I had disagreements with him about what it would take to make those risks more possible for people. Crass were fighting to keep the squats alive because squatting gave more people more freedom to risk failure. It was political. They were able to figure some stuff out together. We don’t have those options now in London.
AM: Exactly, and this is part of the task that we as a collective have taken on. The question is how to take forward Roger’s legacy of facilitating and uplifting countercultural practice, within the changed material reality of London. Our role is to give space for people to experiment, to try something new, and to fail.
GL: The goal can’t be to reproduce a fixed idea of what counterculture looks like. None of us can fully understand all the different experiences that drive people to make art, rebel, express anger, or try to find different ways to repair and cope. Developing the capacity to nurture people, recognise what they’re doing, build relationships, and keep learning feels more important than trying to control aesthetics or define who does and doesn’t belong.
I felt an individual couldn’t do this; it was only gonna work if some kind of collective could form to take on the work. So I approached Alex and Luisa and it’s an honour that they leapt in. We’ve been figuring it out as we go. Dillon Home joined the collective last summer. Things are evolving.
HN: As a collective, how do you approach programming as a practice at The Horse Hospital? Rather than being driven by a fixed aesthetic, whether that’s punk or a particular idea of counterculture, it’s also shaped by the conditions and realities you’ve been describing.
AM: The first event we did when we relaunched The Horse Hospital was deliberately conceived as a model for what we were trying to build. It functioned as a mission statement, a way of showing what we thought space could be. The idea was to bring together people connected to The Horse Hospital’s history, its present, and what might come next. That meant building an eclectic, interdisciplinary programme across two days of music, performance, spoken word, and film to try and capture its broader spirit rather than a single format or discipline. We’re really doing that with Disappearing Images, bringing things together across disciplines and eras. I’ve been really influenced by groups like Plastique Fantastique, whose show After London was the first thing George and I saw at The Horse Hospital in 2016, and they way bring people together and champion and nurture younger emerging artists.
In the relaunch, we worked with performers from 54 The Gate, who did an exhibition here in 2023, and they’ve continued to be part of the space since, most recently with Gate Fashion. For this, clothes from Contemporary Wardrobe were used as raw materials to develop a collection for a fashion show. Models included Maggie Nicols, Jesse Darling, Alya Al-Sultani, Nicky Harris, and Dan Mitchell, and a soundtrack was created for the runway by Rat Section. Olivia Wiles did makeup and Alice Fraser was the stylist. Another event we programmed was called Chorus. This took place right after London Trans Pride 2025. It brought together musicians, poets and activists within a long-form score which we composed with a partly improvised structure. It was about understanding activism as culture, capturing the rage and energy, as well as tenderness and complexity, which is harder to hold in the protest itself.
Much of the programming is about inviting artists to do something unfamiliar or open-ended. To take a risk. In December 2025 we collaborated with Caroline Kraabel to stage a 12-hour durational improvisation on the winter solstice. We did a day with Moor Mother, whose approach to collaboration really aligns with what we’re trying to do. She brought together artists including Shabaka, Klein, Valentina Magaletti, and Thurston Moore; it’s a rare skill to be able to bring together really different musical worlds and set up an encounter that’s generative and fresh. She really does that.
HN: You’re roughly eighteen months into the collective structure, so there’s also a sense of marking the change. Can you talk about your upcoming festival, Disappearing Images in July?
GL: I notice a tendency in contemporary countercultural practice to play with images like they’re disposable. I’m fascinated by trying to imagine who or what is imagined as the receiver of the stuff that gets captured and can’t be contained – where does it go? Everything you have to chuck out when you don’t have a good home for it all. Why make the image if you cannot keep it? I think it’s an interesting question about faith and authority which connects to what I was saying about Roger’s dismay at 2010s artists having so much faith in the state. “Where does this go when it disappears?” is a deep question and the answer reveals a lot politically. Alex and I have been making stuff happen together for a long time. We clearly have faith in something, somewhere all this will go and come back as something better – what do we have faith in? Disappearing Images sits within that context, but it also connects to more grounded questions around urban space, gentrification, alienation, surveillance, and loss.
HN: So Disappearing Images is also about what survives, what gets rewritten, and what slips out of view. What’s interesting about the word disappearing is that it relates to there being constant recording and surveillance and everything being archived, but also that things get lost or fall away.
GL: There’s a deeper anxiety around impermanence. You could describe it as alienation or lack of belonging, but in London it’s quite material, because for most young people, there’s nowhere stable to be. You’re always aware that your time in any space is limited, and so attachment itself is risky, unless you’re in a very privileged position. That creates a kind of affective pressure and expectation of loss before anything has even fully formed. Cultural production gets bound up with developing a defence against disappearance.
But at the same time, there’s a tension around how to archive and sustain countercultural activity without turning it into a product or a fixed identity. Some people lean into ephemerality rather than resisting it. Artists like Adam Gallagher and Ruth Angel Edwards do this. They are both involved in the festival through their facilitation and curation project Existers. I have learned so much from them. There’s a refusal to over-claim or make permanence the goal. It’s a particular way of understanding culture and cultural production. I don’t think it’s always easy. There’s a lot to grieve in recognising that the permanence may never come – disappearance might be constant and inevitable for us – but they seem to have understood earlier than most that it was time to cut losses – just grieve it, and see what’s on the other side of that grief. The impermanence anxiety doesn’t rule them. They have faith, I think, in people.
AM: The Horse Hospital offers people a space to think through that condition, but also to experience it differently, where ephemerality doesn’t only register as loss, even if the moments themselves still feel fleeting.
GL: Something is being figured out.
