We've swapped swans with Churchill and reared polar bears, but now the London Zoo story needs you

For the last 18 months I have headed ZSL (the Zoological Society of London) — the global conservation charity which runs London Zoo. And without fail every week I discover some extraordinary new fact about this much-loved London institution. The words “zoo” and “aquarium” both come from London Zoo. The original Winnie the Bear and Jumbo the elephant were both at London Zoo.

We used to swap swans with Winston Churchill, who tried to ship a platypus from Australia to the zoo in the middle of the Second World War, to raise morale. Our vets still look after the ravens from the Tower of London and the pelicans of St James Park. Charles Darwin was a Fellow. We have a remarkable history. And in 2026 we will be 200 years old.

To kick off our bicentenary, we yesterday launched the ZSL200 History Hive. The purpose of this is to crowd-source some of the missing bits of our story — from memories to letters to pictures to physical items. We want to learn about not just about our own history, but about how we have affected the lives of others.

Our predecessors at ZSL kept meticulous records, which I have spent happy hours trawling through, transported back to another time by the copperplate handwriting of Council minutes and the zoo’s daily record, the smell of the paper and the extraordinary detail they capture.

Our archive has a wonderful collection of artefacts — including a rare first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and a soap shaped in the likeness of Brumas the polar bear cub, the first polar bear cub to be successfully reared in the United Kingdom, and a bona fide zoo celebrity back in the 1940s.

But while we may know exactly who said what in meetings, there’s a lot we don’t know. Our History Hive will help us to collect artefacts and memories that will shed light on the untold history of our world-famous institution, so that in 2026 we can invite London to a new exhibition exploring our past.

And that past is one utterly intertwined with London. We have our headquarters in Regent’s Park, and we are London’s Zoo. We’ve been a part of the fabric of this city since we were first founded in 1826, and we have in turn been moulded by London.

Many of our first animals walked to Regents Park from the Tower of London, where they had been part of the Royal Menagerie. For a century, our animals would arrive in London’s docks and walk through the city. Our new arrivals were often huge news, particularly when they were animals that had not been seen in the UK before like hippos and giraffes.

We have had an impact in less well known, but equally profound ways. We played a key role in the transformation of the River Thames from “biologically dead” in the 1950s to the thriving habitat it is today. We spearheaded a campaign to get Londoners to ditch their single-use plastic bottles, which along with the installation of 29 new water fountains in the capital. We do a seal survey in the Thames Estuary every year, and have been planting sea grass to breathe new life back into London’s river.

And in Regents Park, we are doing extraordinary conservation work — we look after 16 animal species that are “extinct in the wild”, and over 80 species that are endangered or critically endangered. So when our Asiatic lions give birth to three cubs, as they did a month ago, it creates a magical connection between London and the rest of the world.

As a science-based conservation charity, we know what impact we’re having on species facing extinction, we know what impact we’re having on habitats that need urgent restoration, we know what impact we’re having on school children who visit our zoos – and what we want to know now is the impact we’ve had on you. So please join us in our HistoryHive. We can’t wait to see what treasures we’ll uncover.

Matthew Gould is CEO of ZSL