City of Beasts offers a new way to look at the urban environment on the verge of the industrial age. Thomas Almeroth-Williams focuses on London between the accession of King George I in 1714 and that of Queen Victoria in 1837, a period of enormous growth and change. Nevertheless, Almeroth-Williams contends, London remained a city full of animals as well as full of people, with profound impacts on both.Most previous studies of urban animals have focused on pet keeping or on exotic animals in zoos and menageries. Almeroth-Williams looks instead at the animals that kept the city alive and working: not only horses, especially, but also cattle, sheep, and pigs as well as guard dogs. To document their stories, he employs a range of sources underemployed in environmental or animal history: court records, particularly from the open-access Old Bailey Proceedings Online; business records; parish and vestry documents; the digitized, but not open-access, Burney newspapers; and a variety of visual sources. From these, Almeroth-Williams has unearthed a story, or, rather, many stories, of the essential roles of working animals in Georgian London and how these roles changed and adapted over the period.