Tom Coghland
Where the Wild Things Are
The Tower Menagerie: Being The Amazing True Story of the Royal Collection of Wild and Ferocious Beasts
By Daniel Hahn
Simon & Schuster 260pp £15.99 order from our bookshop
WHEREASTO DAY THE Thames foreshore at Southwark is home to little more than the rotting carcasses of shopping trolleys, visitors to London 750 years ago might have beheld a giant polar bear roaming the shingle. The bear, one of the earliest inhabitants of the royal menagerie in the Tower of London, was encouraged to sally forth with its keeper and hunt the ‘fat and sweet salrnons’ of the river.
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