Raffles, Davy and a plot in Regent’s Park, 1826–1828.

London Zoo is the public face of a learned society. English Wikipedia says the Zoological Society of London, usually shortened to ZSL, was founded in April 1826 by Sir Stamford Raffles, the Marquess of Lansdowne, Lord Auckland, Sir Humphry Davy, Robert Peel, Joseph Sabine and Nicholas Aylward Vigors, together with other nobility, clergy and naturalists. Raffles was its chairman and president for only a few months, and Wikipedia says Lansdowne succeeded him and supervised the building of the animal houses.

The idea had been discussed for several years. Wikipedia says that on 29 November 1822 a meeting at the Linnean Society in Soho Square resolved to form a “Zoological Club of the Linnean Society of London”, and that between 1816 and 1826 conversations among Raffles, Davy, Joseph Banks and others led to the idea that London should have an establishment like the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, housing a collection that would “interest and amuse the public”. A parcel of land in Regent’s Park had already been obtained from the Crown at the society’s inaugural meeting.

The gardens opened in stages. Wikipedia says the Zoological Gardens opened to members in April 1828, that the society received a royal charter from George IV on 27 March 1829, that William IV presented the Royal Menagerie from the Tower of London to the society in 1831, and that the general public was admitted from 1847. In 1926 the society bought Hall Farm near Whipsnade in the Chiltern Hills, and Whipsnade Park opened to the public in 1931; ZSL runs both sites today.

The zoo’s name has shifted over time without moving far from its origins. Wikipedia gives the institution’s current name as London Zoo, notes that it was previously known as ZSL London Zoo or the London Zoological Gardens, and says it is sometimes called the Regent’s Park Zoo.

Burton’s cottages, Lubetkin’s spiral and Price’s aviary.

Architecture has long been part of how the zoo presents itself. Wikipedia says the grounds were laid out in 1828 by Decimus Burton, the zoo’s official architect from 1826 to 1841, beginning with the Clock Tower above what was then the llama house, followed by the East Tunnel under the road in 1830 and finishing with the Giraffe House, which is still used for giraffes. The ornate ironwork Ravens’ Cage dates from 1829. After Burton, Wikipedia says Peter Chalmers Mitchell and John James Joass designed the Mappin Terraces, completed in 1914 as an artificial mountain landscape. The Guardian, in an architecture piece by Oliver Wainwright on 20 March 2013, explained that the terraces were the result of a clause in the zoo’s expansion: an extra four acres would be allowed only if the animals kept there could be seen from the rest of the park.

The modernist buildings came next. Wikipedia says the Russian émigré Berthold Lubetkin and his Tecton group designed the Gorilla House of 1933 and then the Penguin Pool in 1934, working with the engineer Ove Arup. Its description, drawing on the Buildings of England, is of an elliptical pool crossed by cantilevered interlocking spiral ramps, with a glass-fronted diving area and nesting boxes, built in reinforced concrete and finished in white render. The Guardian in 2013 described it as a double helix of concrete ramps above a blue oval pool, and said it was the structure visitors still asked for by name. Both buildings were listed at Grade I on 14 September 1970. The penguins left in 2004, and Wikipedia says they moved to a new habitat, Penguin Beach, in 2011.

The 1960s added a second wave. Wikipedia says the Snowdon Aviary was designed by Cedric Price, Frank Newby and Lord Snowdon, built between 1962 and 1964 and opened in 1965, using a pyramidal aluminium framework; The Guardian dated it to 1964 and said its frame mimicked the angular geometry of a bird’s wing. Listed at Grade II* since 1998, it was converted into a walk-through primate enclosure, Monkey Valley, which opened in August 2022.

Newer work has taken the opposite approach. The Guardian reported that the 2013 Tiger Territory, designed by Michael Kozdon, was covered by a net canopy of 3mm steel cable stretched over four black poles, the tallest rising to 20 metres, and quoted him saying “Our aim is to disappear.” Wainwright wrote that a walk through the zoo is as much an architectural safari as a wildlife one.

A concrete spiral and an aluminium frame as the zoo’s silhouettes.

Zoos, aquariums and botanic gardens build their identities around living collections, and the marks they choose often show it: a single animal, a leaf, a flower or a fish drawn as a simple outline that can be cut into a gate, printed on a ticket and stitched onto a staff shirt. The drawing style matters as much as the subject. A fine scientific illustration suggests research and record-keeping, while a bold, flat silhouette reads from across a car park and scales down to a phone screen. Many institutions keep both, using a plain mark for the brand and a deeper library of illustrations for exhibits, guides and the shop.

The other half of the identity is the site itself. Visitors spend hours outdoors on paths that branch, loop and change with the seasons, so wayfinding carries much of the brand’s daily work: colour-coded zones, pictograms, distance markers and maps that double as souvenirs. Signage has to survive sun, rain, frost and curious hands, which pushes designers towards durable materials, high-contrast type and panels that can be replaced one at a time. Glasshouses, aviaries and enclosures often become the emblem, since a recognisable building can stand for the whole place on a poster or a postcard. Throughout, the brand balances two voices: the invitation to a family day out and the message about conservation, research and care for species and habitats, and the design has to let both speak without one drowning the other.

Zoological Gardens, the Zoo and a name for anything large.

London Zoo’s name rests on a word it did not coin. Wikipedia says that after the public was admitted in 1847, Londoners soon christened the Zoological Gardens the “Zoo”. An editorial in The Baltimore Sun on 13 February 1993, written about a different zoo’s renaming, set out the dictionary record: it quoted the Oxford English Dictionary defining zoo as a colloquial word formed from the opening three letters of Zoological taken as one syllable, meaning the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park, London, and later extended to similar collections elsewhere. The paper noted that the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London had opened in 1828 and that the full title was too long for everyday speech, which is how the short form took hold.

The zoo lent another word to the language. Wikipedia says the elephant Jumbo came to London Zoo in 1865 from the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and that his name, possibly from the Swahili jambo, became an epithet for anything of large size, as in Boeing’s Jumbo jet.

The institution behind the word kept its formal name. Wikipedia describes the Zoological Society of London as a conservation charity that runs London Zoo and Whipsnade Zoo, carries out research through its Institute of Zoology. The pairing of the initials ZSL with the place name in ZSL London Zoo, and the later use of plain London Zoo, reflect the same split between society and site that the 1820s founders set up.

For a design guide, London Zoo shows how a visitor attraction can carry its identity in buildings that are themselves landmarks — Burton’s clock tower, a white concrete spiral and an aluminium aviary frame — while the public gives it a name shorter than any the society chose. Compare Kew Gardens, a London living collection with Victorian glasshouses, and the British Museum, another London institution set up by statute and known by its buildings. For this guide we use pool blue, white render and aviary graphite with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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