Beavers in Paradise

The paper follows the activities of the Ealing Beaver Project, an urban rewilding project that the team has worked closely with over the last three years. It documents the ways in which these urban rewilders designed and staged a high-profile experiment in how to live well with a family of reintroduced beavers in an urban environment at Paradise Fields in west London.

The paper characterises this experiment as a form of “prefigurative urban ecological politics,” which describes political programmes that summon the future to anticipate and nurture desired configurations of urban socio-ecological relations in the present. The idea of the Ealing Beaver Project was to leverage encounters with urban wildlife to forge new (re)wilded (human and nonhuman) citizens and to experiment with new forms of urban wildlife management. In doing so, the paper shows how a new form of “municipal wildness” is produced, whereby the wild is positioned as a universal public good delivered via collaboration between the local state and civil society. The reintroduction to beavers in London comes at a time when beavers are rapidly returning to the British countryside, and are soon expected to move into cities across the country.

Jonathon and Tom have been working closely with Citizen Zoo, the urban rewilding NGO that spearheaded the Ealing Beaver Project, to develop an Urban Beaver Management Toolkit to ensure that, when they do arrive, publics and politicians are prepared for coexistence. The Toolkit will be developed through a series of workshops held in London and Berlin over the course of 2026 and involves the participation of a host of organisations including Natural England, The Beaver Trust, the Greater London Authority, and more.