Hornbills at London Zoo's new African Bird Safari walkthrough. The zoo plans to take more of its animals out of cages, starting with the gorillas. Photograph: Shu Di
When Tobias Hill was poet in residence at London Zoo in 1998 he suggested his work could make up for some of the shortcomings of the location.
Poetry can express the complex in clear ways, and the zoo - as a place of locked doors, as a haven for the endangered, as a place of learning - zoos need all the expression they can get.
Things have moved on since then and London Zoo, founded in the 1820s, today announced it is taking rather more concrete measures to overcome the old problem of the locked doors. It is to take down the cages and free the animals from their pens.
First the gorillas will be given their own "forest clearing" on a £5m island where the public can see them from across a moat. By the end of the decade, big cats will be brought closer to the people and plans made to take pygmy hippos and camels out from the behind the bars.
Already open is a "meet the monkeys" area where visitors can walk through a Bolivian forest housing 14 squirrel monkeys. Chris West, zoological director, said: "It may sound a bit cheesy but we want people to go away inspired and having had some real connection with the natural world."
This is no doubt better for the animals, but people have been connecting with them for a century and a half. The peculiarity of an urban zoo like London's is that the animals become part of the city mind and landscape. The London giraffes poke their necks above the trees of nearby Regent's Park as if they are grazing among the picnickers. In Don Delillo's Underworld, one New Yorker prefers to watch animals on the TV than go to the local zoo; the animals there are not proper African specimens but creatures born and raised in the city, she explains.
The Dreamworks film Madagascar takes this further when a lion, a giraffe and a hippo, native New Yorkers from Central Park Zoo, inadvertently find themselves in an African jungle and have to learn to adapt.
Ted Hughes, the former poet laureate, was another writer who found the zoo and city seeping into each other. He worked as a zoo keeper and, after the suicide of his wife Sylvia Plath, he recalled in the Birthday Letters collection, the last he wrote, how he and his children would listen to the howls of the zoo wolves from their Primrose Hill flat.
We were comforted by wolves.
Under that February moon and the moon of March
The Zoo had come close.
And in spite of the city
Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night
For minutes on end
They sang. They had found where we lay
Wolves will, however, not be among the animals taken from their cages. The London Zoological Society, the group that runs it, has moved several of the bigger species to its wild animal park at Whipsnade. Those mammals that are left include meerkats and the oriental small-clawed otter. And, of course, the gorillas.
