Through his focus upon horses, cattle, sheep, pigs and dogs, Thomas Almeroth-Williams makes the case that animal histories are a significant, but neglected, part of the story of Georgian London, that most well studied of pre-industrial cities. The title of his monograph, City of Beasts, is a nod to Peter Earle's 1994 book A City Full of People. Just as Earle shone light on the lives of ordinary Londoners, Almeroth-Williams turns to their four-legged friends, and proposes that appreciating the rich contribution of animals to the metropolis can make us reappraise the history of England's capital. The result is an imaginative, brightly written, yet rigorous book, which will be stimulating reading for scholars of London as well as urban history more generally. It also offers useful insights for historians of industrialization, farming and food marketing, consumer culture, leisure activities and, of course, human–animal relations.
Almeroth-Williams locates his beasts in a variety of places. He combines diverse archival material, such as insurance registers and business records, and evocative illustrations such as trade cards and visual prints, with extensive but careful use of digital databases, chiefly The Old Bailey Proceedings Online and London Lives. These are landmark projects and it is exciting to see their ripple effects on various historiographies, particularly those reliant on identifying small details and incidental evidence. Almeroth-Williams is transparent in his use of these resources, explaining the keywords he used for trawling. Without such tools, finding 64 pig-keeping sites across London would have been too time-consuming to be feasible. Much of this material is plotted on maps of the city, which permit a fascinating discussion of the non-human urban geography. On several occasions, Almeroth-Williams recounts potted micro-histories of businesses or locales. These offer a fresh angle on familiar settings, including Southwark, with its tanneries, breweries and dairies, and Hyde Park, where London's horse-lovers played, showed off and learned to ride.
The book is structured around different animals and their associated activities, with each chapter speaking to diverse broader historical themes. The first two chapters deal with mill horses and draught horses, employed well into the nineteenth century as a source of power in manufactories and on the street. Farm animals populate the next two sections: the cows and pigs reared within the built-up area, and the cattle and sheep driven into the heart of the city to be slaughtered. Horses return in two chapters dealing with equine consumer culture and riding, racing and hunting, before a final chapter deals with watchdogs of all shapes and sizes, which helped keep Londoners’ property safe. Though this arrangement makes it difficult for a core argument to develop through the book's course, it is an effective way of putting animals front and centre and demonstrating their wide-ranging impact on the city.
Almeroth-Williams uses these animals to critique commonplaces of London's historiography. The continuing use of horses in businesses such as tanning and paint-making well after Boulton and Watt started selling their steam engine in 1784 is a powerful counterpoint to innovation-centric narratives of economic change and asserts the capital's often underplayed role in industrial development. Prolific urban and peri-urban agriculture, alongside horse-focused entertainments, complicates the conceptual divide between country and city, especially in the sprawling suburbs. A recurrent theme of the book is the way in which urban growth actually increased interactions between animals and humans (the numbers are astonishing: in 1822, Smithfield market drew 1.7 million animals to its inner-city site). Georgian London also gave raise to new points of contact, such as the highly tuned ‘horse sense’ developed by consumers who filled their mews and stables with steeds for work and play (p. 130). The book as a whole is a challenge to the assumption that urban modernity sharpened the divide between man and the natural world.
The most thrilling moments are when Almeroth-Williams considers what makes his animal subjects special. Pigs’ lack of dietary pickiness helps explain why they suited big city life. Improved horse breeds, like the sturdy Midland Black, were a key factor in equine contributions to metropolitan industry. On several occasions, the author invokes modern studies of animal behaviour, which suggest, for example, how boisterous street conditions disrupted the herding behaviour of sheep, and how short canine sleep cycles made dogs alert guardians of domestic and commercial space. Some of these topics, such as the sentimental attachments between animals and owners, could have been pursued further. But Almeroth-Williams is clear at the outset that he prioritizes ‘tangible interactions between people and animals’ (p. 215), rather than better-studied cultural issues. While the book contains no big statement about the field of animal studies, which Almeroth-Williams was well placed to make, it does speak to such questions, sometimes explicitly, in the case of a concluding discussion of the nuanced contemporary understandings of animal cruelty. At its heart, City of Beasts is an unusual, provocative urban history, which makes exciting methodological contributions and challenging arguments relevant to a range of subjects and disciplines. The only disappointment, for this reader's inclinations, is the notable lack of cats.
