London Zoo

ZSL London Zoo
Outer Circle
Regent's Park
London NW1 4RY
Tel: 020 7722 3333

About London Zoo

The world’s oldest scientific zoo (as opposed to private collection or menagerie), ZSL London Zoo is among the greatest wildlife attractions on the planet. As it approaches its two-hundredth anniversary, the aims and objectives of the Zoo in terms of worldwide animal conservation and preservation have made it one of the most important organisations in its field. On top of this, the Zoo provides an unparalleled opportunity to enjoy the close company of some of the planet’s most fascinating creatures. With over 650 species of animal to meet, it’s little wonder that London Zoo is renowned worldwide for its comprehensive collection and the rare chances it offers for visitors to meet them in an environment close to their natural home.

 

Opened in 1828, the Zoo originally functioned as a collection for study by naturalists, but was opened to the public in 1847. It is managed by the Zoological Society of London, known as ZSL, which also runs Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire. Located on the northern side of London’s Regents Park and with Regents Canal flowing across it, the site is easily accessible and provides a spacious zone for its enormous animal population. Due to the pressures of space in the capital, however, many of the Zoo’s larger animals such as elephants and rhinos have been rehoused at Whipsnade. 

 

There is a vast amount of attractions for the visitor to London Zoo. It contains the world’s first reptile house, the first insect house, the first public aquarium and the first children’s zoo. New additions to the Zoo include a large renovation project that undertakes to make the animal enclosures truer to their home environments; ‘walk-through’ facilities similar to the lemur enclosure at Whipsnade, with these devoted to monkeys and African birds; new ‘Into Africa’ and ‘Butterfly Paradise’ zones; and a brand-new ‘Gorilla Kingdom’ and ‘Rainforest Lookout’. Work is currently underway to re-work the existing Bird House as a tropical rainforest zone housing a wider selection of birdlife. 

 

Elsewhere, make sure that your visit includes a stop at the Clock Tower, built in 1828 to home llamas, and the Giraffe House. As you might expect from a zoo of this heritage, its architecture is another key element of its appeal: both these structures are Grade II listed buildings and were designed by the renowned architect Decimus Burton. Sloth bears and langurs are homed in the Mappin Terraces and there is a famous Penguin Pool. This, as well as the Round House – built in 1932 for the Zoo’s collection of gorillas – was designed by Tecton, the leading architectural designers of the day. Other must-see enclosures include the Snowdon aviary and the Elephant and Rhinoceros House, currently containing camels and bearded pigs. 

 

The list of famous residents of London Zoo is enormous, adding to its worldwide status as a home for extraordinary wildlife. For example, the only living quagga (a type of zebra) ever known was photographed here before its death signalled the extinction of its species, as did a number of specimens of the thylacine, a tiger-like carnivorous marsupial. It is entirely due to the diligence of European explorers and collectors that such animals ever gained the attention of the Western scientific community, as well as the pioneering aims of the Zoo and its managers.

But the heritage of London Zoo doesn’t stop there: on the list of famous animals you can also see Obaysch, the first hippopotamus seen in Europe since Roman times. There’s also Jumbo, the elephant which broke records for its size in the late nineteenth century, Winnie the black bear who inspired the Winnie The Pooh stories after being seen by the author AA Milne, and the famous Guy the Gorilla, who lived at London Zoo from 1947 until his death in 1978.  

 

Along with the enormous number of animals on display, visitors can learn about the way in which London Zoo has brought unusual species to the public eye for over a century. The oldest animal in residence for many years was a great Indian hornbill called Josephine, who lived in the Bird House until her death in 1998, well into her fifties. A polar bear called Brumas (a conflation of the names of the two keepers who cared for him) was so popular in the 1950s that annual attendance once reached an all-time high of over three million, a record that is still unbroken to this day. Another legendary resident was a snowy owl, who fell to the deck of HMS Eros during a storm in the Azores and was named after the ship. Perhaps appropriately given his name, he went on to father 57 chicks during his long life at the Zoo, only dying as recently as 1993. The Zoo’s first giant panda was the equally famous Chi Chi, who was brought to London in 1958 and was one of the very first of her species to reside in a European zoo. Add to this a well-known golden eagle called Goldie, who caused headlines in 1965 when he escaped from his enclosure for two weeks and flew around Regents Park, and a remarkable ‘human exhibition’ staged in 2005 for specimens of homo sapiens sapiens (dressed in fig leaves and other revealing garments) – and the history of the Zoo is almost as fascinating as its modern-day exhibits.

 

The Zoo is as popular in film and TV as it is in the real world, with several appearances in well-known movies. Visitors may recall the scene in the 1981 film An American Werewolf In London in which the lead character awakes to find himself in the wolves’ enclosure, and a scene from the Hugh Grant film About A Boy. Most famously, a scene with a Burmese python (occupying the real-life tank of a black mamba) from Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone was filmed in the reptile house, as well as a scene in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous. The reasons for the Zoo’s popularity on screen as well as in real life are the same in either case: it is a unique location that will form a high point of any visit to the capital.