A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

ZSL London Zoo is open to the public once again. Eleanor Doughty was first in through the gates to greet some of the residents and go behind the scenes of the charity’s conservation programs

- Eleanor Doughty

IT’S 9 am on a Friday morning and I am being stared at by a gorilla. He blinks, I blink back, and then hastily look away, not fancying my chances against a great ape. This is a normal encounter at ZSL London Zoo, which re-opened in April after restrictions were lifted. Once upon a time, it had a bear pit, but the raucous crowds of the 18th century are long gone. Instead, a Covidcompliant one-way system is in action, guiding visitors decorously from penguin to post.

‘In 1828, the zoo had an orangutan, an Arabian oryx and a now-extinct thylacine on display’

The zoo was established in Regent’s Park, NW1, in 1826, by Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of modern Singapore, and the chemist Sir Humphry Davy. In April 1828, it opened for the first time to fellows of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), with an orangutan, an Arabian oryx, and the now-extinct thylacine, a carnivorous marsupial, among other creatures, on display. Given a Royal Charter by George IV the following year, the zoo opened to the public in 1847. A list published in 1883 of ‘the vertebrate animals now or lately living in the gardens of the Zoological Society of London’ runs to more than 700 pages, listing an extraordinary array of creatures, from the yellow-legged herring gull to the crab-eating opossum. An official guide, published in 1911 and sold for sixpence, listed a ‘polar bears’ pond’, a ‘mouse-house’ and a ‘deer and cattle house.