Empire to extinction: The legacy of Bristol Zoo

Andrew Brooks on the passing of Bristol Zoo city centre site and the ongoing debate about its role in the 21st century

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Bristol Zoo closed on Sunday, 3 September, 2023. Families queued to get in. It was a day to celebrate the past and think about an uncertain future. The ever-popular Asian lions, of which there were said to be ‘less than 700 left’ in the wild were the biggest draw that day. The restful big cats were like stoic gatekeepers in their iron-barred enclosure near the entrance, looking indifferent to the change taking place around them. 

Further into the grounds, through the floral gardens and hotchpotch of new modern glass-and-steel cafes and exhibit spaces, and Victorian-brick and stone buildings that marked different eras of development and change, were the small charismatic tree kangaroos and meerkats. These cute mammals drew a lively crowd and brought smiles to children’s faces who recognised their furry forms from cartoons. There was a long queue outside the Butterfly Forest, where flashes of winged colour would pass your eyes in a warm, humid space that mimicked the tropics. The zoo was busy, but some animal enclosures were already empty. As a disappointed visitor observed, ‘The hippos used to be in that, but they’re already gone,’ and another was left forlorn: ‘If we come back… But we can’t’.

Traditional zoos are a relic of the imperial past. Their golden age was during a period of discovery. European explorers struck out to map new territory, colonise places, and categorise the parts of the natural world that were most remote from the Western experience. Zoos formed part of an imperial worldview. For Britons not able to venture overseas or go on expeditions, safaris or big game hunts, they were a place that showcased the exotic colonial world. Zoos didn’t have native badgers, weasels and seagulls, they were full of baboons, walruses and snakes. Bristol Zoo was the fifth-oldest in the world and it’s no coincidence that it was established in an important port city whose wealth was built on imported tobacco and transatlantic slavery. The same ships that docked in the harbour and unloaded their goods from the Caribbean, America, Africa and Asia sometimes brought back new species to populate the developing menagerie.  

As a leisure destination and place of scientific wonder, the zoo, which opened in 1836, took its place in the city alongside other grand urban Victorian institutions for learning, including Bristol Museum, University and Botanical Gardens. All of these places captured elements of emerging global geography as they introduced exotic animals, artefacts from distant civilisations, new cultural and scientific knowledge, and fascinating plant species to a local audience. In London, a similar set of institutions occupies a grander scale, and foremost is the cluster in South Kensington that includes Imperial College London, the Natural History Museum and, of course, The Royal Geographical Society. Each of these were part of a planned effort inspired by Prince Albert to establish ‘Albertropolis’, a brilliant campus of museums, colleges and educational institutions dedicated to promoting the arts and sciences. 

In Bristol, the closing of the old zoo happened in parallel with a reckoning over the city’s colonial heritage. Infamously, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was dumped in Bristol Harbour and this act of protest has catalysed the rebranding of institutions, such as schools and theatres, previously named in his honour. Bristol Museum has also returned a Cree coat to an Indigenous museum in Canada, and there are ongoing debates over the repatriation of prized Benin bronzes to West Africa. 

While the city zoo wasn’t vacated because of anti-colonial sentiment, some of the practices of large-animal confinement and attitudes towards other people and places that were reproduced through the exhibitions were archaic. At the zoo, the colonial motifs weren’t as obvious as stone statues of slavers or stolen bronzes, but the long-defunct Monkey Temple, seemingly inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, did gesture towards Asian societies as being places of heathen mystery. If that sounds a little too culturally sensitive, take a moment to reverse the geographical relationships and imagine how strange it would be if Indian zookeepers in Delhi had crudely recreated a crumbling English parish church and populated it with European bats for the amusement of local visitors. 

What are zoos for in the 21st century? While some remain popular tourist attractions, they don’t have the same mass appeal and wow factor that marked their heyday. In an era of 4K HD TV, we can get a fix of exotic animals in the natural world from David Attenborough documentaries. So, zoos play less of a role in introducing us to the unknown. That said, as a place of inter-species encounters, a zoo enables the curious to meet big cats, marsupials and exotic insects face-to-face without travelling halfway around the world. However, having spent a year with an annual family ticket for Bristol Zoo, and made many repeat visits with my kids, I found they quickly came to value the zoological gardens more for their brilliant climbing frames, wet play area and learning resources than the sometimes fleeting and obscured views of animal life. The loss of this urban recreational and educational space has been keenly felt in many local households. And then there’s their dual role in research and conservation, and in this scientific realm, the case in defence of well-curated zoos becomes stronger.

We’re sleepwalking through a time of mass species extinction, often referred to as the sixth extinction event, following five previous waves in geological history. Since the start of the modern age, which coincided with Victorian colonialism, countless species have gone extinct. The ICUN Red List of Threatened Species provides a tragic chart of the more than 45,300 species threatened by eradication. For endangered species such as the Asian lion, zoos are one of the margins of the world to which surviving animals have been pushed. In a tiny proportion of the most extreme cases, zoos serve as a gene bank, preserving minimal viable populations of animals. But can we really consider these animals survivors if they’ve gone in the wild? Clearly, the answer to species extinction is first to halt habitat destruction, second to restore animal ranges, and third — in extremis — to preserve in captivity. The site in Clifton where Bristol Zoo was based for 187 years may have closed, but this zoo hasn’t gone extinct; rather, it has been reborn in a new location eight kilometres outside the city centre next to the M5 motorway. Formerly the Wild Place Project, since 2024 it has officially become the new Bristol Zoo. At 136 acres, it’s much larger than the old 12-acre Clifton location but still only half the area of the average UK farm, so it’s very much part of the peri-urban green belt rather than anything approaching wilderness. Couched in the language of the global environmental crisis, the project was established in 2013 as a centre for global conservation and a tentative push towards re-wilding. To take the second focus first, this new initiative is part of a wider trend towards reintroducing extirpated (locally extinct) species to the British Isles. The Bear Wood invites visitors to take a journey 10,000 years back in time to a period when the landscape was populated by dense ancient forests whose inhabitants included bears, lynxes and wolves. These large predators can now be spied by eagle-eyed visitors in open enclosures that dwarf the old city site’s barred pens, although for context, a wild wolf range would be many thousands of hectares. Elsewhere, the new zoo still houses many familiar exotic animals, including cheetahs, giraffes, and the child-pleasing meerkats, but now these species enjoy more extensive spaces, and their presence is accompanied by extensive signage that emphasises research, breeding programmes and the challenge of climate change. Despite these new narratives, there are still some echoes of the former colonial atmosphere that was a hallmark of the original Bristol Zoo and its contemporaries. Most notably this includes a Congo Bongo play area — a name that to my mind is uncomfortably close to the pejorative term ‘Bongo Bongo Land’ used to refer to African countries. 

What next for the Clifton site? This highly desirable real estate is marked for housing development. It’s a shame for the city to lose a valuable space for leisure and education. As one of the visitors on the last day said of the Wild Place Project, ‘It’s not going to replace Bristol Zoo for Bristolians.’ Building homes will bring millions of pounds of revenue to Bristol Zoological Society. Still, work is yet to start and the decision-making process and recent management of the site are questionable. As recently as 2017, a new £1.8 million, 300-seat Hide Restaurant was opened, and yet within three years, it had been decided to close the zoo. Today’s urban planners lack the long-term strategic vision of their Victorian forebearers, who, despite their problematic world views, were bold in planning entire cityscapes that created accessible civic spaces for leisure and education and introduced their citizens to new geographical horizons.