By Sarah Young and Will Russell
LONDON, March 13 (Reuters) – Sandwiched between social housing blocks and busy train tracks in south London is Britain’s most urban riding school, where children from disadvantaged backgrounds learn to ride horses as part of a project aimed at improving their wellbeing.
About 160 children each week attend the Ebony Horse Club, a 30-year-old charity in the Brixton area of the capital which ranks amongst the most deprived in England and is a hotspot for knife crime.
Outside the stables, opened in 2011 by Queen Camilla, nine-year-old Matthew Sanchez shovelled horse dung into a wheelbarrow before his lesson.
Like many of the children who come for classes, he had never encountered a horse before. But riding teacher Rachel Scott-Hayward, 37, said the children grow in confidence over weeks, learning to ride, grooming the animals and mucking out the stables.
Nylah Murray Charles, aged nine, said she was nervous before trotting on a horse for the first time.
“I got scared a bit, but I was like maybe I should just give it a try… when I tried, it was actually great and I had fun,” she said.
The club is an oasis of rural charm in Brixton, about three miles (5 km) from central London, where the smell of hay hangs in the air. Lessons are free – a contrast to similar stables in wealthier parts of the city, where a 30-minute class can cost around 50 pounds ($67).
Scott-Hayward said while horse riding was traditionally “a white, upper-class hobby”, the charity made it accessible to local children, about 45% of whom identify as being from an ethnic minority.
The stables have become a home-from-home for Shanice Reid, 29, since she first learnt to ride with the project as a schoolgirl. She now teaches at the club, and said it offers “somewhere to escape” for those with difficult home or school lives.
Between 2010 and 2019, about a third of London’s youth clubs closed due to cuts to public funding, shrinking services for young people just as the pandemic hit.
Scott-Hayward said that horse riding can also be an antidote to the anxiety that she increasingly sees in children who spend a lot of time on screens and social media.
“When you’re on a horse, you can’t really think about too much else,” she said.
($1 = 0.7466 pounds)
(Reporting by Sarah Young and Will Russell; Editing by Ros Russell)
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