ZSL London Zoo

London Zoo is perhaps one of the world’s best known zoos, and also one of oldest. It officially opened in 1828 to fellows of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), with its original purpose being a place for scientific research. It opened to the public in 1847, and holds the distinction of opening the first reptile house (1849), public aquarium (1853) and children’s zoo (1938) in the world. Although only around half the size of Dublin Zoo, London is home to a far higher number of species, with well over 600. The zoo is still run by ZSL, which also runs Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire, where the larger animals such as elephants and rhinos have been moved to more expansive enclosures.

My family and I visited first visited London Zoo in August 2011 when we went to stay in London for a week. This is the zoo where I first saw the okapi, a rare forest giraffe that is now endangered in the wild. Other animals which we saw for the first time included a pair of sleeping aardvarks, the Komodo dragon, the slender loris, and the Galapagos giant tortoises. I even climbed into a fake bronze shell at the tortoise exhibit. We also saw pygmy hippopotamuses for the first time and we would see this species again in Edinburgh Zoo and Rotterdam Zoo in the years that followed.

While we did enjoy our visit to the zoo, we seemed to end up missing certain species of interest, especially those that we never saw before such as the giant anteater, Malayan tapir (both of which we first saw in Belfast and Edinburgh Zoo), and the aye-aye (which Dublin Zoo would eventually get more than a decade later). New exhibits since my visit there include Land of the Lions, Tiger Territory, In with the Lemurs, Monkey Valley and the Secret Life of Reptiles and Amphibians.

I would eventually revisit the zoo in April 2024, when I was learning how to take my own trips abroad with just my mother accompanying me. Aside from seeing the aforementioned new exhibits, we saw many new species, including the Chinese giant salamander, tamandua, Malagasy giant rat, bokiboky (a small Madagascan carnivore), pygmy slow loris, Lake Titicaca frog and crocodile lizard, as well as a pair of Sulawesi babirusa (which we had seen before in Chester Zoo). The aardvarks are unfortunately gone from London, but the plethora of firsts for me ensured that this trip was even more enjoyable than the first.

Link to their website.