Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 1 (2016), p. 122

The charmingly titled Palaces for pigs is a revised and expanded version of Lambton’s earlier Beastly buildings (1985), a book that somehow escaped review in this journal. This updated edition of the earlier National Trust-published volume aims to bring Lambton’s lively accounts of a diverse range of beastly buildings to a new readership. This is in many ways very timely: interest in animal histories and animal geographies is burgeoning, as the growing number of volumes in Reaktion’s Animal series and recent books by Hannah Velton (Beastly London), Peter Atkins (Animal cities) and Arthur MacGregor (Animal encounters) all attest.

As Lambton argues in the opening pages, the British population’s enthusiasm for and love of animals over more than seven centuries has resulted in the construction of ‘an array of animal buildings which are second to none in the world’ (p. 12). Over the course of the book, we encounter not only stables, cow houses, pigsties and hunting lodges, but also fishing temples, a monkey pagoda, a gothic duck house, a castle for goats and elaborate memorials dedicated to horses, a ship’s cat and lots of dogs (including Lambton’s own). Given the respective publishers of the two editions the book necessarily focuses for the most part on buildings in the care of national heritage organizations including the National Trust and English Heritage. Hence the beastly buildings featured are mostly in England, predominately rural in setting and many of them were originally part of the country estates of the landed classes, though they are none the less fascinating for that.

While the introductory chapter briefly sets the scene, the remaining chapters cover four major themes: stables and sporting buildings; animals for the plate; menageries; and animal memorials. Each consists of a fairly brief overview of each type of animal architecture, followed by animated vignettes of extant examples, many of them open to the public for at least some of each year. Much of the book is thus effectively a gazetteer. Amongst the more intriguing examples to feature are the third duke of Marlborough’s fishing temple at Bray, decorated with Andien de Clermont’s paintings of monkeys angling, shooting and riding in boats and Elizabeth, duchess of Rutland’s kennels at Belvoir Castle.

As one would expect from an English Heritage/ Historic England volume, the book is lavishly illustrated with full and half page colour plates of the various buildings discussed. There is much here to engage rural and agricultural historians and country house visitors alike, even if for the academic reader there are necessarily also points of expansion and clarification which one feels might have profited the book. Thus, for example, Lambton tells an uncomplicated story of growing ‘enlightenment’ about animal cruelty which would have benefited from a more nuanced telling. Greater thought too could have been directed to the question of why these buildings were built as they were: Lambton assumes it was for the love of the animals housed there, and doesn’t seem to recognize that the buildings were caught up in improving ideologies and thereby intended to articulate politics and power, taste and intellect, not just to provide fitting homes for various animal ‘friends’. Careful editing of the text to remove some of the quirkier and sometimes repetitive turns of phrases and the surprisingly large number of exclamation marks would also have been beneficial. Both undoubtedly stem from Lambton’s obvious love of animals and her great passion for architecture, the ‘two whoppingly powerful forces’ (p. 12) which animate this quirky book. While it lacks the nuance and theoretical underpinnings of much recent work on the theme of more-than-human histories, this is still much to enjoy in this volume. Even the most experienced heritage tourists or historians of the aristocracy will surely find something new to explore here! And I for one will be adding a handful of these buildings to my country house bucket list! (Unnecessary, tongue-in-cheek exclamation marks entirely intended.)