From empire to extinction: The legacy of Bristol Zoo

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

Bristol Zoo closed on Sunday 3 September 2023. Families lined up to get in. It was a day to celebrate the past and reflect on an uncertain future. The much-loved Asiatic lions, of which there are said to be “less than 700” left in the wild, were the biggest attraction on the day. The calm big cats were like stoic gatekeepers in their iron-barred enclosure near the entrance, appearing indifferent to the changes taking place around them.

Further back in the grounds, through the flower gardens and the hodgepodge of new, modern glass and steel cafes and exhibition spaces, and through 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 the faces of children who recognised their furry forms from cartoons. A long line formed outside the butterfly forest, where winged flashes of colour flew past your eyes in a warm, humid room that mimicked the tropics. The zoo was busy, but some animal enclosures were already empty. One disappointed visitor remarked, “The hippos used to be in there, but they’re already gone,” and another was left despondent, “When we come back… But we can’t.”

Traditional zoos are a relic of the imperial past. Their golden age was the time of discovery. European explorers set out to map new territories, colonise places and categorise the parts of nature furthest removed from the Western world. Zoos were part of an imperial worldview. For Britons unable to travel abroad or go on expeditions, safaris or big game hunts, they were a place to showcase the exotic colonial world. Zoos had no native badgers, weasels and gulls, they were full of baboons, walruses and snakes. Bristol Zoo was the fifth oldest in the world and it is no coincidence that it was founded in a major port city whose wealth was based on imported tobacco and transatlantic slavery. The same ships that docked at the port and unloaded their goods from the Caribbean, the Americas, Africa and Asia sometimes brought back new species to populate the developing menagerie.

A leisure destination and a site of scientific wonder, the zoo, which opened in 1836, took its place in the city alongside other major urban Victorian educational institutions, including the Bristol Museum, the university and the Botanical Gardens. All of these places reflected elements of the emerging global geography by introducing local audiences to exotic animals, artefacts from distant civilisations, new cultural and scientific knowledge and fascinating plant species. London has a similar array of institutions on a larger scale, and most notably the cluster in South Kensington, which includes Imperial College London, the Natural History Museum and, of course, the Royal Geographical Society. All of these places were part of a planned effort inspired by Prince Albert to establish ‘Albertropolis’, a superb campus of museums, colleges and educational institutions to promote the arts and sciences.

In Bristol, the closure of the old zoo coincided with the city’s coming to terms with its colonial legacy. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, a statue of slave trader Edward Colston was thrown into Bristol Harbour. This act of protest led to the renaming of institutions such as schools and theatres that had previously been named after him. Bristol Museum has also returned a Cree coat to an indigenous museum in Canada, and there are ongoing debates about the return of valuable Benin bronzes to West Africa.

Although the city zoo was not cleared for anti-colonial reasons, some of the large-scale animal husbandry practices and attitudes towards other people and places reproduced in the exhibitions were archaic. At the zoo, the colonial motifs were not as obvious as stone statues of slave traders or stolen bronzes, but the long-defunct monkey temple, apparently inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, has pointed out that Asian societies are places of pagan mystery. If that sounds a little too culturally sensitive, reverse the geographical relationships and imagine how odd it would be if Indian zookeepers in Delhi had rebuilt a dilapidated English parish church and populated it with European bats for the amusement of local visitors.

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What are zoos for in the 21st century? While some are still popular tourist attractions, they no longer have the same mass appeal and wow factor as in their heyday. In the age of 4K HD television, we can get a dose of exotic animals in the wild in David Attenborough documentaries, so zoos play a lesser role in bringing us closer to the unknown. However, as a place of interspecies encounters, a zoo allows the curious to meet big cats, marsupials and exotic insects face to face without having to travel halfway around the world. However, after having an annual pass to Bristol Zoo with my family for a year, and making many more visits with my children, I found that they quickly came to appreciate the zoological garden more for its amazing climbing frames, wet play area and educational materials than for the sometimes fleeting and obscured glimpses of animal life. The loss of this urban recreational and educational space is being felt keenly in many households in the area. And then there is their dual role in research and conservation. In this scientific area, the arguments in defense of well-run zoos are becoming increasingly strong.

We are sleepwalking through a period of mass species extinction, often referred to as the sixth extinction event, which was followed by five previous waves in Earth’s history. Since the beginning of the modern era, which coincided with the Victorian colonial period, countless species have become extinct. The ICUN Red List of Threatened Species provides a grim overview of the more than 45,300 species threatened with extinction. For threatened species such as the Asiatic lion, zoos are one of the peripheral areas of the world to which surviving animals have been relegated. In a tiny proportion of the most extreme cases, zoos serve as gene banks and maintain minimal viable animal populations. But can we really consider these animals survivors if they have migrated to the wild? The answer to species extinction is clearly first to stop habitat destruction, second to restore the animals’ ranges, and third – in extreme cases – to preserve the animals in captivity. The Clifton site that was home to Bristol Zoo for 187 years may have closed, but that zoo is not extinct; in fact, it has been reborn at a new location five miles outside the city centre, next to the M5 motorway. The former Wild Place Project is officially the new Bristol Zoo as of 2024. At 136 acres, it is much larger than the old 12-acre Clifton site, but still only half the size of the average British farm, so it is part of the city’s outskirts greenbelt rather than anything close to wilderness. The project, couched in the language of global environmental crisis, was founded in 2013 as a centre for global conservation and a cautious push towards restoration. To deal with the second focus first, this new initiative is part of a wider trend to reintroduce extirpated (locally extinct) species to the British Isles. Bear Wood invites visitors to travel back in time 10,000 years to a time when the landscape was populated by dense ancient forests, whose inhabitants included bears, lynx and wolves. These large predators can now be spotted by eagle-eyed visitors in open enclosures that dwarf the barred enclosures of the old city site, although by comparison a wild wolf enclosure would cover many thousands of acres. Elsewhere, the new zoo still houses many familiar exotic animals, including cheetahs, giraffes and the child-friendly meerkats, but now these species enjoy greater open spaces and their presence is accompanied by extensive interpretive signage highlighting 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. This includes, above all, a Congo Bongo playground – a name that, in my opinion, is uncomfortably close to the derogatory term “Bongo Bongo Land” for African countries.

What’s next for the Clifton site? This highly desirable piece of land is earmarked for residential development. It is a shame for the city to lose a valuable space for leisure and education. As one of the visitors on the final day said of the Wild Place project, “It will not replace Bristol Zoo for Bristolians.” Building housing will bring millions in revenue to the Bristol Zoological Society. However, work has yet to start and the decision-making process and recent management of the site is questionable. Only in 2017 did a new £1.8 million 300-seat Hide Restaurant open, and yet within three years the decision was made to close the zoo. Today’s city planners lack the long-term strategic vision of their Victorian forebears who, despite their problematic worldviews, were bold and planned entire cityscapes that created accessible public spaces for leisure and education and opened up new geographical horizons for their citizens.