Alwaysevergreen
Well-Known Member
Look as someone whose whole family is from Bristol. My dad grew up in Kingswood, my mum in Bedminster. My nans until their deaths in the early 2000s lived in Bristol. We were not a wealthy family, so every Easter and summer holidays, me and my siblings spent the summer with our nans.
Visits to Cricket St Thomas, Longleat and Bristol Zoo were the norm,
My parents moved back to Somerset when we had left school and I have spent the best part of 40 years going to the Zoo. I have photos and memories etched a long way, and like many others I was emotional at its closure, and went several times during its final year. I was a member last year and for years on and off over the years.
But you have to be realistic, somewhere has to move with the times, and Bristol with its limited site, was never going to be able to keep ABC animals forever, and the more well known family animals would have had to move to Wild Place, to accommodate this. But whether Bristol Zoo would have survived as a place with smaller animals I don't know.
It's well and good a zoo making 200K a year, maybe 400k avg if you factor in the busier years, but massive new exhibits would cost millions, so for the Lions and Gorilla's to have been bought up to standard and renovated, would cost ten years of profits. Then there is no guarantee those figures would have been maintained.
But the two years figures of big losses are also not a true reflection of the business and perhaps the 2022 accounts when they are published will give more of an insight of how the business was doing in the year of closure. Lets not forget, its closure was announced in 2021, so this website/petition, call it what you want had a year to try and gather support to give realistic opposition or support, but they waited until it was already closed, animals were moved and nothing could realistically be done, without causing further delay and a backward step which benefits no one.
Also I visited several times in 2022, and near enough every time except for the last two weeks, it was one man and its dog there. Yes what was there was getting less and less, but aside of Wild Place, the emergence of Noahs Ark, which has better public transport links than Wild Place had already seen what were regular Bristol Zoo visitors going over to Failand for a day out. Yes those last two weeks were busy and incredibly busy on the final couple of days, but the trend had very much been a growing one since re-opening after Covid.
I loved Bristol Zoo, I had many happy memories and days there, but I also appreciate for the area of Bristol to have a truly magnificent zoo, which is up to modern day standards, it can only happen at Wild Place and not in Clifton.
No, Clifton does not need more wealthy housing, you are right and there are loads for sale already, but Bristol Zoo have to raise as much capital as possible, and their plans protects a lot of the buildings and gardens, yet raises a Substancial amount of money. For the West Car Park and the Main Site alone, you are talking 25-35m to buy it based on the plans. Funds which would help build a state of the art facility off the side of the M5, which will attract more visitors. Lets not forget the damage the Clean Air Zone would have also had on the Clifton site. If the decision of free parking and no £9 charge is an option at Wild Place or Noahs Ark, or having to pay minimum £12 extra to visit Bristol Zoo, it is a no brainer as to what audience is going to be attracted.
What would Bristol Zoo have got if selling the site for a Zoo, as a 12acre site. I don't physically know, but when collections twice/three times the size, with their current business and animals are potentially available at around £5m. then I would suggest the sale of Bristol Zoo to remain as a zoo, would not bring anywhere near the funds it would as a development, and say they had an offer of 2-3m for it as a zoo, even empty, even if that was for the main site and they could still sell the West Car Park for housing and generate 5-8m for that alone, I doubt it would even be considered, because it wont scratch the surface of the funding Wild Place will need.
I read an article the other week, that in 2022, Chester Zoo had 143,000 members or thereabouts. People generally paying £87 a year on direct debit. Many of these members were not even local, and several thousand were people from abroad. I personally am a Chester Zoo member and I go at least 2 times a month, so for me it works out at £3.63 a visit, but it is £30 there and back in petrol for me and then there's food and so on. But except for the very local residents, I wonder how many of these members go to Chester more than the 3 times to make it pay. I am also a stupid member, as I have annual membership at Paignton, Edinburgh and Bristol. All these collections that I could have visited on my Chester pass, but I done it to support the zoos, not to benefit on free entry. But Chester's annual members alone brings in close to £12.5m a year! That's without considering extra spending when visiting, and they know they have this funding in every year.
Now Bristol I think like many areas miss a trick. There are around 300,000 people of working age in Bristol, if the Zoo tried to make contact and say if you live in the three areas of Bristol you can get an annual pass at say £20 for unlimited visits, you set a very low bar. Now some people don't even like animals, many are anti zoo, but supporting your local community, even if say 20% of that 300,000 agreed to such offer would generate 1.2m. Most of these people would rarely if ever use the pass, they would see it as helping the community, and maybe you throw in newsletters and stuff online, competitions, all to make it look worth that £20.
But I don't think Bristol really had many annual members. Chester set the bar, but Edinburgh even has around 45,000 paying around £60 a year. I mean I pay £4.84 a month by direct debit, and I rarely go to Edinburgh Zoo! But its £5 a month, £5 I wont even notice when it goes out my bank account.
I do think at a lot of zoos fundraising and marketing teams are very poor, even worse are a lot of their social media teams. Some zoos seem to have great relations with local press. Look at Chester Zoo, a news and updates group which is run by Cheshire Live, has over 10,000 people posting pictures and reading about the zoo on a daily basis and Cheshire Live report on everything the zoo does to help it gain national and international awareness. Yet in some areas, the only time you hear about something, is when something negative happens.
I personally feel that Bristol Zoo was its own undoing, they didn't move with the times, and they didn't endear themselves to the locals and whilst there are 4300 odd signatures on a petition to try and reopen it, and they are only 700 away from it actually having to be put forward, they don't identify any realistic solutions and its more about, I've lost my childhood memories.
I was very lucky before it closed to have 20 minutes of Simon Garrett's time talking about the zoo, its future plans and so on and there was many suggestions about how you could educate people about what Bristol Zoo was.
Whether it be a small museum at the planned new café, or many of the well known artefacts left at the zoo with signage. Perhaps even the odd aviary which volunteers could manage. They could also offer virtual reality tours, so you walk around with a headset on and see what the zoo was before using cgi and videos. These are all plausible ideas which could educate future generations of how one of the worlds oldest zoos got to a stage, where it had to close, to make way for a better future, one that aids conservation and better serves the community and the area. The problem is, if you don't educate people, then they never learn. I feel so much of what the people who have signed/written this website and petition want, could realistically be answered and shown to them, that the heritage of the site is being protected, the memories don't need to vanish and actually what the Zoo wants to create offers way more benefit then trying to save a zoo, which ultimately would have had to change its inventory completely or been closed regardless of the effects of Covid at some point in the future.
It's closure was obviously very sad, and for someone who grew up loving Bristol it saddened me. But I also know it was the correct decision.
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