Ye Olde Green Hut

When newspaper editor George Armstrong couldn’t find a cab during an 1875 snowstorm, drivers had all fled to pubs, he rallied philanthropists to build narrow green huts across London. The Metropolitan Police had one rule: each shelter could be no wider than a horse and cart. Inside, bacon sandwiches and tea were served, but alcohol was strictly forbidden. Only 13 of the original 61 survive, still slinging coffee to cabbies with “The Knowledge.”

One of them, Ye Olde Green Hut, sits mid-road on Kensington Park Road, built in 1909, three decades after Armstrong’s original blizzard-induced inspiration, to designs by architect M Starmer Hack. It arrived too late to know a horse-drawn London, though it kept the horse-and-cart proportions anyway, since the rule never changed even after the vehicles did. Now Grade II listed, it spends its days doing exactly what it was built for, minus the cabbies who invented “The Knowledge” and plus the tourists who’ve never heard of it.