Why Are Beavers Back In The UK? Benefits And History

The animals of Ealing’s Paradise Fields have some unexpected new neighbours.

For the last couple of years, beavers have been making an enclosed 10-hectare site their watery home – and since more or less their 2023 arrival, a London Underground ticket office that used to be plagued by flooding has remained dry.

The city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has praised Ealing’s beavers for putting an end to soggy conditions in parts of nearby Greenford Tube station on Instagram.

“Beavers are nature’s engineers – we just didn’t realise how efficient they could be,” Khan said in his post, adding, “These incredible creatures have already stepped up to stop flooding at a Tube station and restore local habitats”.

We spoke to Elliot Newton, the director of rewilding at Citizen Zoo, which worked with the Ealing Beaver Project to reintroduce the animals, about why they were brought back to the West London site and how they might help us humans.

It’s not just London. In recent years, beavers have been released across the UK, including other parts of England like Somerset and Cornwall. Scotland has kept the wild beavers spotted as early as the 2000s, the Natural History Museum said, with planned releases in the Glen Affric Nature Reserve and River Beauty set for 2026.

Wales seems keen on bringing beavers back, too. Northern Ireland hasn’t expressed interest yet, but the animals were probably never native there, unlike the rest of the UK.

“The Eurasian beaver is a native British species that was hunted to extinction around 400 years ago (and likely disappeared from London much earlier),” Newton told us.

“Over the past two decades, there has been a growing movement to restore beavers across Great Britain.”

And while the expert argued there’s a strong case for bringing all kinds of native species back to boost our ecosystem – including those we might not love the idea of, like the rat-sized, fish-eating fen raft spider – “beavers also deliver significant practical benefits”.

He continued, “As ecosystem engineers, they create and maintain wetlands that can reduce flood risk, improve water quality, increase drought resilience, and support a huge range of wildlife”.

Newton said that flood mitigation was one of the main reasons they secured funding for this project.

That’s because beavers (famously) build dams which stop the rapid flow of water down rivers during, e.g., periods of extreme rainfall. They also form ponds and mini “canals” that can create absorbent wetlands.

“Through building dams and creating wetland habitat, the beavers have increased the site’s capacity to store water and slow flows during heavy rainfall events, helping reduce downstream flood pressure. Interestingly, since the beavers arrived, the local train station ticket hall, which had previously experienced flooding, has not flooded,” Newton said.

“While more research is needed, this is an encouraging example of the potential for nature-based solutions to support climate resilience in urban areas.”

Other benefits people involved in the Ealing Beaver Project have noted include increased biodiversity, better community engagement (leading to a reduction in antisocial behaviour), and a more climate-change-resistant environment.