London Zoo

Listen for a moment before you look. Somewhere ahead, a gibbon may be calling, a rising, looping whoop that carries over the trees. Closer by, there is the crunch of gravel paths, the chatter of families, and the low hum of traffic along the edge of Regent's Park. It is an odd mix of sounds for central London. Wild calls, city buses, and birdsong all share the same air here.

You are standing in the oldest scientific zoo in the world. The Zoological Society of London founded it in the 1820s, and the gardens opened in 1828. That word, scientific, matters. This was not built first as a fairground or a royal menagerie. It was built as a place to study animals, and for its first years, only members of the society and their guests could walk these paths.

The man behind the society was Sir Stamford Raffles, a colonial administrator best known today as the founder of modern Singapore. He collected plants and animals on his travels and wanted London to have a serious centre for natural history. Sadly, he died in 1826, the same year the society was formed. He never saw the gardens open. The ordinary paying public was finally let in during the 1840s, and the zoo has welcomed visitors ever since.

Here is the first surprise. The everyday English word zoo grew out of this very place. Londoners shortened Zoological Gardens to the Zoo, and a popular Victorian music hall song about walking in the zoo helped spread the short form. So every zoo in the English-speaking world carries a small echo of this patch of Regent's Park.

The gardens also pioneered ideas we now take for granted. Over the nineteenth century, the zoo opened one of the first reptile houses, the first public aquarium in the world, and an early insect house. The word aquarium itself became popular because of the fish house here. Walk around today, and you are moving through a long series of experiments in how to show living animals to curious people.

Science came through the gates too. Charles Darwin visited in the 1830s, not long after his voyage on the Beagle. He spent time watching an orangutan named Jenny. He noted her expressions, her moods, and her reactions to a mirror. Those observations fed into his thinking about how close humans and other apes really are. Think about that when you pass the primates today.

Now for a story every child in Britain half knows. During the First World War, a Canadian soldier brought a black bear cub to London. She was named Winnipeg, after his home city, and she came to live here. Visitors called her Winnie. One young visitor was a boy named Christopher Robin Milne. His father, the writer A. A. Milne, borrowed her name for a certain honey-loving bear. Winnie-the-Pooh began here.

Another famous name is Jumbo, a huge African elephant who gave children rides in Victorian times. In the 1880s, the zoo sold him to the American showman P. T. Barnum. The British public was outraged, and letters of protest poured in. But Jumbo sailed to America anyway. His name stayed behind in the language. Today, anything enormous is jumbo, from jets to sausages.

Look around at the buildings, because the architecture here is as unusual as the animals. The most celebrated piece is the Penguin Pool, designed in the 1930s by Berthold Lubetkin and his firm, Tecton. It is a white concrete oval with two long spiral ramps that curl past each other with no visible support. It became a landmark of British modernism, the clean, functional style of that era, and it is now protected at the highest level of listing. The penguins, though, have moved to a newer, more natural home nearby.

Above the northern edge of the gardens, you may see a great tent of aluminium and steel mesh rising over the trees. This was the Snowdon Aviary, created in the 1960s by Lord Snowdon with the architect Cedric Price and the engineer Frank Newby. It was one of the first walk-through aviaries, where birds flew freely over visitors' heads. In recent years it was restored and given a new life as Monkey Valley, a home for colobus monkeys.

The Regent's Canal runs through part of the zoo, cutting a quiet green channel between the enclosures. Narrowboats glide past at walking pace, and people on the towpath sometimes catch a glimpse of animals they never paid to see. It is one of the gentle oddities of the place. Water traffic from the nineteenth century, sliding past a modern conservation zoo.

Modern London Zoo is very different from its Victorian self. The focus now is on conservation, breeding programmes for threatened species, and research. Areas like the lion enclosure, home to the endangered Asiatic lion, and the large tiger territory are designed around more space and more natural cover. And here is one more thing most visitors miss. Every January, keepers carry out an annual stocktake, counting every animal in the gardens, from the tigers down to the smallest insects.

Before you move on, take a slow breath and look at what is right in front of you. Notice the old brick and the bright modern glass side by side. Listen again for those calls over the trees. Nearly two centuries of people have stood on these paths, with the same mix of wonder and curiosity you feel now. As you walk out toward the park, keep an ear open. The zoo will follow you a little way, in sound, long after the gates are behind you.