This project uncovers the histories and ghosts of ‘Bovril Castle’ at Kingswood Estate. Kingswood House, a 200-year-old mansion remodelled by Bovril inventor John Lawson Johnstone into a mock castle, stands as a monument to meat, empire and masculine endurance. Bovril, condensed beef for soldiers, embodies extractive capitalism, colonial cattle economies and the fetishisation of strength. When the estate became public property in the 1950s, a council estate grew around it, and it became “the castle in the council estate”.

The word Bovril takes its name from ‘bo’ meaning bovine and ‘vril’ from virility. Inspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton book, The Coming Race (1871) where the ‘Vril’ a subterranean “superior race” inhabiting an advanced civilisation, this macho myth became both the name of the beef paste and fuelled later fascist and Nazi occult fantasies. Embedded within this history is a suppressed feminist narrative about Rosina Bulwer Lytton, an Anglo-Irish writer whose husband Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of The Coming Race used his power to have her confined to an asylum after she exposed his abuse in her own novel. Her erasure mirrors the legacy of The Coming Race. In 2025, these ideas persist in new forms, from far-right online cultures to billionaire techno-pronatalism, where reproduction, virility and capital are fused into renewed eugenic dreams. ‘Vril’ is now a banned term on TikTok due to its association with the manosphere and far-right ideologies. Taking Rosina’s story as a starting point, the project asks how queer, feminist communities might reimagine reproduction, family and care beyond nationalist and bro-natalist visions.