The last paying visitor at Bristol Zoo exited through the gift shop at the end of an emotional day in September 2022. It was the first Saturday of September, the last of the school summer holidays and the final visitors, reluctant to leave, gave an impromptu three cheers and a round of applause to the staff fighting back the tears.
But now, almost two and a half years on, with the gorillas still living happily on the island in the middle of the iconic Bristol Zoo Gardens site in Clifton, the zoo is still there, mothballed with the ghosts of 186 years of memories, and with a question still hanging over its future – a question that will finally be answered in the first weeks of 2025.
For that will be when a legal challenge mounted by a group of local residents, funded by people from across Bristol, takes place at the city’s Civil Court. The Save Bristol Gardens Alliance is mounting a Judicial Review against Bristol City Council, challenging the council’s decision to award planning permission for the zoo’s vision for the future of the famous site.
Bristol Zoo first opened in Clifton back in 1836, and became famous around the world. In 2020, the Bristol Zoological Society, a charity which runs the zoo, announced it would be closing in 2022, with the site partially redeveloped, and the focus and the name ‘Bristol Zoo’ effectively moving to the out-of-town location the society originally opened to the public in 2013.
More than six months after that closure, in the spring of 2023, the Society was awarded planning permission to build around 200 new homes, in blocks of flats, around the edge of the gardens, which would be a publicly-accessible park, with the zoo maintaining a ‘visitor hub’ in what was the offices and entrance building of the old zoo.
The build up to that crunch council meeting in 2023 saw alternative uses for the zoo site put forward, the aftermath into 2024 saw fundraising to fight the decision in the courts. The end of 2024 saw an auction of hundreds of items from the original zoo, including sculptures and benches, raise around £200,000 for the charity, but spark renewed fury among those who have been fighting for a different future for the former zoo’s site.
At the start of December, the chief executive of the zoological society told Bristol Live that their vision – for the flats and the park and the hub and the expansion of the Wild Place Project, now renamed Bristol Zoo Project – was the only viable option. The Zoological Society took the decision to close the zoo, saying it was ‘not fit for the 21st century’, and from that point had to balance maximising the amount of money to go towards the expansion of the Bristol Zoo Project site at Easter Compton, with a redevelopment that would still be in keeping with the Clifton area and the zoo’s legacy and presence there.
And that is where the battle commences. For those imminently taking the zoo to court, there are alternatives and the zoo has not got the balance right. The ongoing legal challenge means the zoo cannot complete the sale of the land to the developer and this spring – if the case is still continuing – it will be two years from the moment the councillors on the planning committee gave their permission, with the zoo not really any further forward in their project.
And the months and years have seen things get increasingly fractious. Now, the Bristol Zoo Gardens Alliance are not pulling any punches anymore.
“Many agree it was time to revisit the concept of an urban Zoo,” said a spokesperson for the Bristol Zoo Gardens Alliance. “But an abrupt change from conservation charity to property developer? The Society still brushes aside the enormous environmental harm it will do to the Gardens. Ignore the greenwashing about planting saplings, ‘affordable’ housing, ‘free public access’ and a nice cafe.
“Biodiversity will be destroyed, irreplaceable mature trees uprooted, a road and car parking introduced and luxury flats of truly ugly design and enormous proportions will destroy this precious site forever. The scramble for profit at all costs is a shaming spectacle,” they added.
The Bristol Zoo Gardens Alliance, as did those who put forward several alternative plans for the zoo’s future back in the months the zoo’s site was being debated in the run-up to the council meeting, dispute the zoo’s claim there was no viable alternative future or vision.
“Ever since the Zoo suppressed a KMPG report into other options – which it still refuses to disclose, even to its own shareholders – it has clung to its single-minded strategy against massive opposition, reason and argument,” a BZGA spokesperson said.
“We understand that far from a ‘really positive response’ from property developers, just ONE compliant bid came in. This developer is perfectly able to apply after five years to remove the expensive inconveniences of ‘affordable’ housing and ‘free public access’ – and no one seriously believes they will be watering saplings while pouring concrete. The Zoo Gardens will become a private gated community of luxury flats as fast as you can say ‘developer’s profit margin’. This is the wrong plan on the wrong site and we will continue to fight to stop it,” they added.
In the run-up to the zoo decision at City Hall in April 2023, a number of what used to be called ‘city leaders’ – high profile figures in Bristol and nationally – gave their backing to several different ideas for what to do with the zoo site if it was no longer to be a zoo.
Zoo boss Mr Morris said that, put simply, no one showed them the money. For the Bristol Zoo Gardens Alliance, that’s because they never asked.
“The Alliance says there are indeed many potentially viable alternatives for the site, but the engagement of the Society in developing alternatives is required before these plans can be fully advanced,” a BZGA spokesperson said. “In the two brief discussions the Alliance has been permitted, trustees have been dismissive of anything other than massive, and environmentally damaging, housing development.
Mr Morris told Bristol Live there wasn’t really a Plan B – and if the council lost the judicial review and had to quash the planning permission, it would depend on why, and how far the zoo would be sent back to the drawing board.
“It is a tragedy that the venerable Bristol Zoological Society has reached this point,” a BZGA spokesperson said. “A board of notable talent has inexplicably bet the Society on a development plan which is almost universally disliked, to support a project in South Gloucestershire which is failing year on year to attract anything like the visitors it must get to fund its ‘conservation mission’.”