Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 1 (2014), p. 180

Hannah Velten’s book is a beautifully illustrated, well researched, accessible and evocative history of animals in London. This is a narrative account, and Velten draws on a wonderfully wide range of sources – literature and popular commentary, prints, illustrations and photographs, the work of diarists and satirists, as well as official material – which, along with a sensitive yet direct written style, bring the story to life. By addressing the history of animal-human relations in one place, she is also able to capture and extraordinarily wide range of animals and the ways that our treatment of them has changed dramatically over time. In part this has been about animal welfare, but it has also been about changing notions of ‘civilization’, and about technology: by 1947, when the Ministry of Transport banned horse-drawn vehicles from major London thoroughfares at peak times, there was less need for them. Beastly London captures the complexity of the ways in which humanity has historically shared its urban space – be that space roads, homes, circuses, railway stations, markets, slaughterhouses, dairies or parks – and by doing so makes us pause.

This is not a book written solely from a human point of view, however. As an experienced journalist who has worked for Farmers Weekly and someone who has worked with dairy cattle, Velten has managed to take on board the ‘animal turn’ and put it to very good and steady use. For example, we see the animal ‘voice’ in the form of vignettes, or moments of animal biography. Through these, the animal characters come alive, so that we can know them better. But, demonstrating a very subtle understanding of recent academic discussions about animal welfare in its various guises, Velten never writes of the animals sentimentally. In fact, many stories are very likely to disturb, and she underlines the awful conditions in which many thousands of animals were housed and slaughtered, or under which they were handled and worked daily. These vignettes engage the reader, while Velten moves the narrative forward on the larger scale and traces each element of animal history to its close. At the same time, and strikingly for a popular history, Velten manages to avoid what could be a simple story of progress. Her writing is superbly nuanced.

The book covers pets of all kinds; the vermin that Londoners housed accidentally; animals in the Royal Menagerie, the Tower of London and, later, London Zoo; animals used for entertainment – including dancing bears and fighting cocks – in circuses, theatres and other venues; animals used for draft and power; animals farmed, marketed, driven and slaughtered; animals vivisected; and animals celebrated. It demonstrates that humanity, as environmental historians as well as animal ecologists have argued, has lived within an enormously rich set of networks with other animals for a very long time. Though the book ends a little too soon, it also serves to remind us that we still live in those networks, if in altered form. We accommodate other animals in more ways than we might at first think.