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.
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
