The pigs of Britain continue to evolve, and in the commercial sector various imported breeds have made their mark in the continual quest for improvement. Ironically, pigs that are superficially (in colour) similar to some of the British rare breeds, and which originally owed their development to English pigs, have been brought over from the United States to improve the British gene pool. These American breeds include the red Duroc, the belted Hampshire and the semi-lop Chester White.

The Large White is one of Britain's three main commercial breeds; the other two whites are the British Landrace and the Welsh. The lop-eared Landrace was introduced into the United Kingdom in 1949 from Sweden and deliberately bred for British conditions and markets. The sows are good, prolific and docile mothers and are often crossed with Large White.

The Welsh has had a varied history. It is claimed that pigs came into Wales in Viking times with the Celts who took refuge there (mass pig migrations are recorded in the Maginogion saga). Welsh pigs in later history were typical of the Old English lop-ears, usually yellowish, sometimes with black spotting; they and the Cornish pigs were described as 'wolf-shaped' in the eighteenth century. There were a few primitive brown pigs, similar to those in Scotland described in 1872 as 'an alligator mounted on stilts'.

Now the most numerous pig in Britain (and probably in the world), the prick-eared and hearty Large White, with its slightly dished profile, is well adapted to intensive farming systems for bacon and pork.There was, briefly, a small Yorkshire Blue-and-White, or Bilsdale Blue, which became extinct in the late 1950s. But creating blue-and-white bacon pigs by crossing Large White boars on Large Black sows was common practice for a long time.

Many loca white breeds have disappeared over the years or been absorbed by the few that remain. The old White Leicester was possibly the result of crossing pigs bred by one of the pioneers of livestock breeding, Robert Bakewell (1725-95), and originating from white, light spotted or mahogany local Leicester pigs crossed with a black boar, or from white Chinese, or it might simply have arisen from breeding local pigs with the soon to be famous Middle White or Small White from Yorkshire. Despite its name, the White Leicester of the latter half of the nineteenth century was sometimes categorised as 'brown' or was described as light with black or brown spots.

The Improved Essex came from Squire Western of Felix Hall, the original importer of the black Neapolitan pigs from Italy. He crossed his imports on big Essex sows to create his Essex Half-black (black one end, white the other), and his tenants used the cross to create the Improved Essex as a small fat black pig giving top-quality pork.
Large black or 'blue' pigs were found right across southern England from Cornwall through Sussex to Kent. At the very end of the nineteenth century all of them were brought together to form the Large Black, which also absorbed the Small Black of East Anglia. The Large Black was a very popular and very large bacon breed in the 1920s but is rare today. Its 'mealy' black colour protects it in hot climates, and it is thoroughly hardy in its own country as a handsome and gentle outdoor grazer.

The Midlands spotted pigs included yet another favourite British breed: the Gloucestershire Old Spots or Orchard pig. The old Gloucester was of the typical Old English slouch-eared type, dirty yellowish-white in colour, and traditionally it had wattles (fleshy tassels) dangling from its jowls. The Old Spots type developed in the Berkeley Vale (probably through crossing with the old Berkshire), where it thrived on whey and windfalls. The breed had a vague history until a breed society was formed in 1913, when selected spotty pigs were taken into the herdbook. It was unpretentious but a good farmer's pig, producing heavy hams and good bacon, prolific, docile behind its lop ears, a grazer, and very hardy. The breed society marketed the breed magnificently, and there was a huge boom in spotted pigs, but the bubble burst in the 1940s and it became rare.

In the early 1970s Joe Henson of the Cotswold Farm Park, the co- founder of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, crossed a Wild Boar with a Tamworth sow for the sake of a group of archaeologists wanting livestock for a reconstructed Iron Age village. The resulting piglets were striped, like those of the Wild Boar, and Henson continued to breed his Iron Age hybrids, selecting for the darkest and most docile ones.
The colour of the old Berkshires and Tamworths is reflected today in the Oxford Sandy and Black (OSB), a breed with a chequered and sometimes disputed history. It might have derived originally from an old Oxford Dairy pig crossed by the Marquess of Blandford with his black Neapolitan boar and a later cross with Essex blacks to create the Improved Oxford.

The Berkshire became the favourite pig of the nineteenth century, widely used to improve other British pigs and to produce crossbreds for slaughter, but its popularity declined during the twentieth century until it became a rare breed.
Today the Berkshire is an attractive-looking prick-eared breed - said to have a good sense of humour - and has improved considerably to meet more modern tastes in recent years. Although it is black-haired (with touches of white on the legs, face and tail switch), its carcass 'dresses out' white, and the flesh is fine, with a high proportion of lean to fat; and it matures early. The sows make excellent easy-going mothers with plenty of milk for their litters, which average nine piglets.

The English midlands in the eighteenth century was the heartland for slouch-eared, splodgy-coloured pigs. There was, for example, a large hefty spotted curly-coated Warwickshire pig, a red-and-black or brindle Shropshire pig (as well as a better-quality Shropshire white), wire- coated black-and-white spotted pigs brought across the border from Wales, blue-and-white Cheshire pigs, red-and-white pigs in Herefordshire, and a mixture of white, coloured and spotted Staffordshire pigs that were either large and slouch-eared or smaller and prick-eared.

By the early eighteenth century there was plenty of variation in British pigs. Some were communal scavengers; some were cottage pigs; some lived well on the by-products of dairy and arable farming. Gradually regional types developed, differing in the carriage of their ears, the length of their bodies and legs, and their skin and coat colours. There was a broad tendency for white pigs to be favoured in the north (the famous Yorkshire pigs, for example), black or black-and-white pigs in the south, and spotted and blotched multi-coloured pigs of red, black and sand in between.