City of Beasts: How Animals Shaped Georgian London

By the early 1800s, an estimated 31,000 horses were at work in and around London, while around the same number of sheep and cattle were driven through the city's streets every week. No other settlement in Europe or North America had ever accommodated so many large four-legged animals, or felt their influence so profoundly. City of beasts reveals the extraordinary contribution that horses, cattle, sheep, pigs and dogs made to the world's first modern metropolis, as well as the challenges which they posed. Following in their hoof- and paw-prints, this book reappraises London's role in the industrial, agricultural and consumer revolutions, as well as key aspects of the city's culture, social relations and physical development. In doing so, it calls for animals to be accorded agency and integrated into social and urban history. City of beasts focuses on the tangible evidence of dung-bespattered interactions between real people and real animals drawn from a wide variety of archive records. As a result, it offers new insights into the lived experiences of Georgian Londoners, as well as the workings and character of a city about which we still have much to discover.