London Zoo - The Regent's Park, Outer Circle, London, UK - Zoos on Waymarking.com

The main entrance to the Zoo is on Outer Circle, a road that runs within the perimeter of Regent's Park. There is some pay-and-display parking available on Outer Circle and the zoo has a car and coach park with limited capacity. The cost of the car park, for zoo visitors, is £14.50 (June 2012) for a car or a motorbike. The Barclay's cycle scheme has a docking station immediately opposite the main entrance to the zoo and the nearest tube station is at Camden Town or at Baker Street. The 244 bus runs past the zoo on the outside of Regent's Park.

The zoo is open every day of the year except Christmas Day and opening hours are from 1000-1730hrs each day. During the summer the closing time extends to 1800hrs.

Prices vary but, in the peak season (summer), the prices are:

Peak season 2012                                                          Full price
Adults                                                                                 £22.00
Children                                                                             £17.00
Children under 3 years                                                     Free
Concession - senior, student & disabled adult              £20.00

Tickets can be purchased in advance on-line.

The Days Out Guide website (visit link) tells us:

"With over 720 animal species, exciting and innovative new exhibits and heritage-listed buildings almost as famous as their inhabitants, ZSL London Zoo it's a great day out in the capital for visitors of all ages and sizes.

Penguin Beach is the latest exhibit launched in 2011. Recreating a South American beach landscape in the heart of London, the new exhibit is home to stunning colonies of around 100 Macaroni and Humboldt penguins. A larger pool with underwater viewing areas allows our visitors to see how our flippered friends fly under the waves. 

Come face to face with a whole host of animals at the Amphitheatre with our Animal in Action display. Prepare to be thoroughly entertained as they show off their flying, leaping and climbing skills. Then, make your way down to the display lawn to catch a glimpse of some amazing birds in flight. Hunters and scavengers demonstrate their skills at finding and catching food in our free-flying display.

Enter London's only living rainforest with a lush vegetation and warm tropical mist and go on a journey high into the treetops to meet a variety of amazing rainforest species including marmosets and tamarins, sloths and a tamandua.

With Gorilla Kingdom, the serenity of the African forest arrived to the urban jungle. If you are feeling adventurous take the gorilla tracking trail and wind your way around the African forest environment. You will get breathtakingly close to our colony of western lowland gorillas!"

The Good Zoos website (visit link) tells us:

"The London Zoo is Britain’s best known zoo, it’s National zoo, and one of the most famous and prestigious collections in the world. It is the primary home of the Zoological Society of London, and it occupies thirty six acres of a Royal Park, less than two miles from the centre of the city of London.

The Zoological Society of London was founded in 1826 at the instigation of its first president, Sir Stamford Raffles (who is rather better known as the founder of Singapore). Raffles obtained the land, and saw the first plans for the zoo, but in the same year that the Zoological Society was founded, he died, reportedly of apoplexy; so he never saw the scientific establishment that he had envisaged, for ‘teaching and elucidating zoology.’ That was left to his successor, the third Marquis of Lansdowne, who obtained a parcel of land from the Crown at Regent’s Park at a nominal rent, and who supervised the building of the first animal houses.

The gardens opened in April 1828 to members of the Zoological Society. The public were not to be admitted for almost two decades, but among the animals they might have seen before the turn of the century were such rarities as Arabian oryx, greater kudus, Indian and Sumatran rhinoceros, aye aye, the now extinct quagga (a species of zebra), and the equally extinct thylacine (a marsupial wolf). Among the zoo’s regular visitors was Charles Darwin, a fellow of the Zoological Society, from 1831. His particular fascination was the orang utan, the first ever seen in Europe.

One of the great popular characters of the nineteenth century was Jumbo, an African bull elephant who came to the zoo as a baby and ended up as a six-ton cantankerous beast. Jumbo was so loved by Londoners of the time that there was a national outcry when the Zoo Council and Abraham Dee Bartlett, the zoo’s superintendent, sold him to Mr Bamum of Bamum and Bailey’s Circus. Jumbo sailed to the United States where hedrew huge crowds until his death in a train accident two years later. London Zoo benefitted from the sale to the tune of two thousand pounds.

For the first sixty-five years, every tropical animal in Regent’s Park was kept indoors in the belief that they would not survive in the cold, fresh air of London. This was to change with the new century when Dr Peter Chalmers Mitchell, who was appointed secretary of the Society in 1902, set about a major reorganisation of the zoo’s buildings. Many of the animals came out into the open, and most of them thrived. This was a revolutionary new idea inspired by Hagenbeck of Hamburg Zoo, and it led to a new era of building and design which has firmly left its mark upon the park. Today there is still a great feeling of history about London Zoo, lending the whole park a special ambiance quite fitting for this, the birthplace of British zoos.

For decades the London Zoo has had no real equal in this country. Other zoos have opened, and flourished, but for generations there have been at least twice as many species here in the heart of London as there have been at any other British zoo. At the beginning of the 1990s there were almost 7,000 animals in the Royal Park. The nearest any other collection came to matching that figure was Chester Zoo with just under 3,500 animals; and despite the fact that 4,000 or so of London Zoo’s animals were fish or invertebrates (and most of those were ants), there was still a superabundance of wildlife that you would see in no other zoo: the wombat for example, or the Tasmanian devil, the long nosed potoroo, the grey ground cuscus, or the four eyed opossum - and these were only the marsupials. Altogether on a day at London Zoo you might have seen representatives of nearly half the mammal species kept in British Zoos. The sheer size of the collection at London was part of the zoo’s appeal, but may also have been the root cause of the zoo’s financial problems. There may never be a collection of this size in Britain again.

There is a recommended route to take you economically around the zoo, but it is worth buying and using the excellent guide book; otherwise you may soon find that the zoo seems much larger than you might expect, and it is difficult not to miss whole sections out. Most tours around London Zoo begin with the primates. The Sobell Pavilions, built for the apes and monkeys in 1972, are right in front of you as you come through the gates. This will also be your first introduction to the signs - another feature of the London Zoo that has no equal. Perhaps it is the influence of the great museums nearby; perhaps it is a spin-off from the education department that. plays host to sixty thousand children every year; or perhaps there is just a greater commitment to educate the public here than at any other zoo. Whatever the reason, Regent’s Park seems to have a policy of putting a sign upon every available blank space, and you could easily spend a day simply reading your way around the zoo. Some zoo directors are sceptical about the value of interpretational signs. They doubt whether the average visitor will ever read more than a fraction of the information that a zoo could display. Maybe there is, a danger of this when every sign is a monotonous litany of gestation times, litter sizes, and diets - and that surely applies to the signs at many zoos; btit not at London. Here imagination has taken over, and nowhere are there two sets of signs the same, even in format. The signwriters have decided that we want to know what is interesting about the occupants of each enclosure, and that is what they have given us. So our tour around the Sobell Pavilions begins with a huge evolutionary tree showing our own relationship to the old and new world monkeys. Then, as we proceed around, each section has a sign that announces its residents: ‘Spider Monkeys - The tail hangers’, reads one; ‘Squirrel Monkeys - sociable and chirpy’, ‘Gorillas - vegetarian gentle giants’, and ‘Macaques - the all-rounders’. The enclosures are all grass floored and well branched with a ceiling of girders to provide more climbing space. They are a little low, but seem well suited to the needs of most of the monkeys, which are kept here in large social groups. Indoors the dens are brick-built and fairly roomy with glass viewing windows. Nearly all the primates breed well here, and you may see several parents carrying young. The chimpanzees (‘Like us - noisy and showy’) spend more time swinging arm to arm than in many zoos which provide less three-dimensional space, but perhaps they would be noisier and showier if they had a little more room to rush around.

The gorillas have the same outside pen and climbing roof as the monkeys; and maybe here the pavilion suffers from a slight uniformity of design - these huge apes looking rather uncomfortable in what is quite clearly a monkey cage. A statue of Guy the gorilla stands alongside, climbed upon by countless children. It is a permanent reminder of the zoo’s best loved resident since Jumbo.

All the apes are identified by photographs and names. Chimp faces vary almost as much as humans, and the photographs remind us that every animal is an individual, each with his, or her, own unique personality.

The aquarium at London Zoo was built in 1924, and it is still the largest in the country. Two hundred thousand gallons of fresh water and sea water circulate through its hundred exhibition tanks. Twice a year sea water from the Bay of Biscay is brought in the ballast tanks of ships to top up the water in circulation. The hall is long, with most of the light coming from the tanks themselves. Perhaps the best feature is the seawater hall where a three thousand gallon display tank holds a whole variety of tropical marine fish and invertebrates.

Next door is the reptile house, with a huge collection of snakes and lizards on display. Many of the signs there feature venom as their point of interest, and one of the many snakes on display is the carpet viper, responsible (so the sign tells us) for several thousand deaths a year in Africa.

Outside again, the elephant and rhino pavilion is good from the visitor’s point of view, but maybe somewhat lacking in space for the animals. To make up for this the elephants are widely exercised out and about in the zoo, to the clear delight of visitors, and one hopes of the elephants too.

One recent resident of this building was Ben, a northern white rhino who was flown in 1986 to join the only other captive rhinos of his race at Dvur Kralove in Czechoslovakia, a move that looks likely to be helpful in saving this subspecies from extinction. The newest residents (at the time of writing) are Rosie, an adorable black rhino who was born at the zoo in 1989, and Jos, a young male black rhino who arrived from Dvur Kralove in November 1990.

The jackass penguins have a famous and fascinating pool, dating back to 1934 and designed by the architect Lubetkin, with a network of concrete ramps and bridges.