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Picture source: Darkstar

The Driftbridge was situated on Reigate Road. This pub opened in 1932 and closed in 2004. It is now in residential use.

I was too young in the 1950’s to use the pub but I learnt to ride at the Driftbridge Stables that used the old stables from when it was a Coaching Inn. When I was more competent I was permitted to progress from the one hour rides over Epsom Downs to the weekly two hour ride and I would ride Penny, a chestnut mare and my friend the chestnut gelding George. She would stay with her aunt at the Driftbridge Hotel each weekend and spend a lot of hours riding, I quite envied her! Whilst I don’t recall going into the pub, I do remember an off-licence stable door to one side by the old stable where a horse called Duchess was stabled. That was a lonely stable and she was not happy there on her own so they moved Penny and George into this large brick stable. They moved between the stable at the back of the hotel and one of the old coach houses at the top of the area for the Driftbridge Stables and they had a bar across the open doors by day and could see the other horses stabled at the bottom in a row of, I think 6, with the tack and feed rooms in the middle of each set of three. The manure heap on the right by the entrance before you got to the stables. Four ponies would be hitched to posts by the coach houses and the sand school was on the left, standing with your backs to the stables. Once I was a little older my parents allowed me to spend the weekends helping with mucking out, cleaning tack and the best bit – being allowed to ride one of the ponies bareback to their field at night. There was a garage just beyond the hotel, a large garage on the corner and I remember that one year they filmed Candid Camera there, filling a Bubble Car with an unexpectedly large amount of petrol. Another memory of that time was the bus stop at the bottom of the road and I’d catch the 164 to home in Sutton. One Saturday some older riders, who had a car, offered me a lift back to Sutton. I sat quietly in the back as the 3 of them chatted and then the lady in the front passenger seat got a gun out of the glove compartment. I was so very, very scared but all was well and I continued to see them on the weekly 2hr rides. It was, with hindsight, a wartime souvenir of service I presume. By the time I was 13 in 1964, my parents had finally relented and I had my own pony and did not ride from the stables thereafter.

Rita Westlake (December 2023)

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