T 77 
“ JAMRACH’S.” 
“ Jamrach’s,” the ancient and original centre of 
the wild-beast trade in London, lies in what is now 
called St. George Street, but was until late years 
known as Ratcliffe Highway, not many minutes’ 
walk beyond the Tower. It existed when the King’s 
lions were kept in the Tower itself, and was established 
thirty years before Sir Stamford Raffles conceived 
the notion of the Zoological Society. The shop 
itself is almost the oldest building in the street, far 
older than the docks and their lofty warehouses 
opposite, and dating back as far as some of the later 
work in the Tower itself. The main bulk of the 
traffic from the docks which line the river for miles 
below rolls past its doors, which open to receive 
the ship-captains’ ventures of birds and wild beasts, 
armour and “ curios,” idols and fetishes, mummy 
and Dyak skulls, weapons and snake-skins, and the 
odd zoological bric-a-brac which are part of the minor 
stock-in-trade of the “ naturalist ” salesman. The 
front of the shop in which these are displayed looks 
like an old picture. Time and varnish, with the dust 
N 
