Georgian Menagerie: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century London by Christopher Plumb – review

Lions on Tottenham Court Road, camels on the Strand … England’s capital once teemed with beasts

There was a peculiar hazard to riding a horse down the Strand in late 18th-century London. As you passed Exeter Exchange your steed might well be startled and rear at the roars of the lions and tigers caged in the menagerie there. The writer Charles Lamb, at his lodgings in Temple Lane, said he liked to hear the big cats as he walked home after an evening’s socialising. The roaring was one of the sounds of the city. As Christopher Plumb’s richly anecdotal history shows, Georgian Britain – and particularly Georgian London – was, surprisingly, thronged with exotic animals. This was the era in which Britain became the world’s leading imperial power, and exotic fauna was “the bounty of empire”. Britons were fascinated by the beasts the colonialists sent home.

Before the zoological gardens of the 19th century arrived, entrepreneurs made small fortunes from acquiring and displaying extraordinary animals. Joshua Brookes’s menagerie at the end of Tottenham Court Road specialised in exotic birds, but also offered antelopes, lions, monkeys and porcupines. You could view Richard Heppanstall’s collection of camels at the Talbot Inn on the Strand. At the end of the century you could pick up a kangaroo from Pidcock’s menagerie at Exeter Exchange or be allowed to pat and stroke his apparently docile rhinoceros (the subject of a beautiful painting by George Stubbs). You could hire a cassowary for the evening to entertain your guests.

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