The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has reached its bicentennial, a milestone that marks two centuries of tension and fascination between the urban and the wild. To commemorate the occasion, the society has commissioned Poet Laureate Simon Armitage to pen "The Moon and The Zoo," a new work featured in a celebratory animation. The commission situates the modern institution within a long-standing tradition of literary engagement with London’s menagerie.
For two hundred years, the zoo has functioned as more than a scientific repository; it has served as a psychological landscape for some of Britain’s most influential creators. The resident bear, Winnipeg, famously inspired A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, while the bronze lions of Trafalgar Square were modeled after animals observed at the zoo by Edwin Landseer. The institution also looms large in the mid-century poetic imagination, having provided both the setting for Sylvia Plath’s "Zoo Keeper’s Wife" and the inspiration for Ted Hughes’s "The Thought-Fox," informed by his brief tenure as a zoo dishwasher.
Armitage’s new verse reflects a shift in the institution's identity, moving from the Victorian spectacle of the exotic toward a contemporary focus on conservation and global ecology. By weaving poetry into its anniversary, the ZSL acknowledges that the study of life is as much an exercise in narrative and metaphor as it is in biology. The zoo remains a place where the human gaze meets the animal kingdom, producing a cultural record as enduring as the scientific one.
With reporting from The Guardian Science.
Source · The Guardian Science
