London is home to its fair share of curiosities. From lost rivers (the River Fleet, for example, once joined the Thames having flowed through Hampstead and the City), disused Underground stations (Aldwych, on the Piccadilly Line, only shut in 1994), and cemeteries for the ‘outcast dead’ (Crossbones in Bermondsey, closed in 1853, held the remains of an estimated 15,000 paupers, including those of medieval sex workers). Few oddities, however, received quite the same reception as the quagga.

Arriving in the capital from South Africa 200 years ago, this half-striped mammal looked rather as though a horse had decided to go to a fancy dress party as a zebra, but changed its mind halfway through preparations. Once settled in NW1, the quagga became a sensation. Observers remarked on its mild temperament and the faint, almost musical snort it offered in lieu of the expected bray, a sound that contributed handsomely to its mystique.

Sadly, the plight of the quagga had no happy ending. By the 1880s, wild quaggas had vanished from the South African veld thanks to habitat pressure and overhunting, making it one of the first high-profile mammalian extinctions of the modern era. The only known photograph of a quagga was taken at London Zoo in 1870. It died two years later. By the dawn of the 20th century, there were none left anywhere on earth.

It’s an early cautionary tale about the fragility of the world’s more eccentric marvels; something that, exactly 200 years ago, was part of the motivation behind the creation of the Zoological Society of London (a century after its founding, the zoo would provide a home to one of the world’s last Tasmanian tigers).

A tale of empire, scientific ambition and recondite Victorian whimsy, the story of London Zoo can be traced back to a dinner in Soho Square hosted by the Linnean Society. It was April 1826 and those present were a group of scientifically-minded luminaries who, doubtlessly obscured amid a fug of tobacco smoke, decided to form a zoological society.

An adolescent giraffe looks through the barn door of the Decimus Burton-designed Giraffe House in 1952. Image: Nell Turner

The first public appearance of Dumbo the elephant, April 1949. Image: alamy

At the head of the venture was Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, already famous for founding modern Singapore. His tenure as the society’s president didn’t last long; Raffles died that summer of apoplexy. Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne, future Chancellor of the Exchequer, stepped in as his successor. Other founding members included Sir Humphry Davy, the chemist famed for his laugh-inducing experiments with nitrous oxide, Joseph Sabine, a celebrated naturalist and lawyer, and the Irish politician and zoologist Nicholas Aylward Vigors, best known for devising a way of classifying different types of birds. Their objective was bold: they would bring ‘animals … from every part of the globe … to be applied … to some useful purpose, or as objects of scientific research, not of vulgar admiration.’

The phrasing is telling; the society was conceived not as a cheap spectacle, but a serious institution of knowledge. The aristocratic founders saw the creation of a zoo as a new way to assert Britain’s intellectual and imperial leadership. A circus this was not to be. The intention was to create a living laboratory.

Regent’s Park was decided as the location for this ambitious project, the area in the process of being shaped by John Nash’s grand vision of royal crescents and garden squares. It was not yet the manicured, genteel world we see today, however. In the early 19th century, the park was still a muddy, underdeveloped corner of London, formerly used for hunting.

London Zoo, the world’s first dedicated specifically to science, opened on 27 April 1828 – a timeframe that would barely be considered long enough to appoint a PR firm these days, let alone build a zoo from scratch. As the founders intended, it was not an attraction for the typically curious Londoner or the out-of-town visitor. Operating a strict members’ only policy, the first visitors were Fellows of the Zoological Society, distinguished scientists and the odd aristocratic gent with the right connections.

Tempting as it is to condemn this measure as Victorian snobbery, the admittance exclusivity was at least partly based on the animal’s welfare. The founders of London Zoo worried that opening it to the masses would risk endangering inhabitants. In an era when most people’s experience of exotic animals was through rickety, Vaudeville-style circuses, the nascent society felt that by restricting admission it was distinguishing itself from older, more chaotic European menageries (before London Zoo, animals were usually kept in royal menageries or private collections).

Other than the quagga, those lucky or learned enough to gain access back in 1828 would have spotted bears, Arabian oryx, greater kudus and orangutans. Back then, the environment was, as we might expect, not an especially sophisticated one. The first zookeepers complained about the stench of nearby cow sheds, which drifted across from the surrounding farmland. Accommodation for animals might best be described as humble. The first elephant was held in what was generously described as a ‘house’. In truth, it was more a rickety shed. Keepers lived on-site in wooden huts of a similar architectural standard. One later noted that the resident wolves howled him awake at dawn with “the punctuality of a church bell.”

On 25 May 1836, four giraffes – three males and one female – were escorted through London from the docks at Blackwall to Regent’s Park in a spectacle that included crowds and a police procession to clear the route. The giraffes, shipped from Sudan by a French trader named George Thibaut, triggered a phenomenon the press dubbed ‘Giraffe mania.’

Londoners were positively enchanted with the look of these extraordinary animals, even extending to ladies’ hairdos; high-piled coiffures in the style of ‘la giraffe’ became all the rage. Staffordshire potters like John Ridgway created giraffe pattern transferware, while newspaper cartoons illustrated genteel members of London’s high society craning their necks to mimic the newcomers. To house the famous new arrivals properly, the Society commissioned a unique structure from the most revered architect in town. Decimus Burton, mastermind of Kew Gardens’ greenhouses and much of Folkestone and Tunbridge Wells, had been tutored by John Nash and was already responsible for the Wellington Arch (though was most displeased with the statue of the Duke that was awkwardly erected on top of it).

Completed in June 1837, Burton’s giraffe house reached a dramatic 6.5 metres at the eaves and even included an early central-heating system so the long-necked residents could stay cosy. The quartet of giraffes, named Selim, Mabrouk, Guib-allah and Zaida, seemed happy with their new lodgings. Their house, now Grade II-listed, remains home to the zoo’s giraffes today.

The only rival to the ‘tall four’ in terms of celebrity was Charles Darwin. Elected a fellow of ZSL in the same year the giraffes arrived, Darwin was particularly fond of an orangutan named Jenny. Their interactions bore quietly on Darwin’s thinking, helping to shape his views on evolution, behaviour, and our place in nature.

It was exactly what the founders had intended for their project; the zoo may have become famous, but this wasn’t show business. Rather, the presence of these exotic animals was intended to prompt serious inquiry, played out amid the grandeur and quirks of the park. Darwin was the zoo’s ideal guest, but the clarion call for admission from the general public couldn’t be stymied for much longer.

Ultimately, what led to general admission in 1848 wasn’t philanthropy, but funding. The Society needed more revenue, and membership alone couldn’t sustain its rapidly growing costs, and ambition. Burton’s designs made the zoo not just functional but aesthetically refined. Over time, more architectural innovations followed: the ZSL opened what would be the world’s first reptile house in 1849; the first public aquarium in 1853; and an insect house in 1881. By this point, half a century before the iconic brutalist Penguin Pool was built, London Zoo, a pioneer in early veterinary science, had grown to become the most famous on the planet, helping invent the concept of the modern zoo in the process.

Visiting today, 200 years on, the park remains, in its quieter corners, the outdoor salon of Raffles, Burton and Darwin. On early mornings, if you stand beside the glass of the reptile house or beneath the lofty roof of the giraffe pavilion, you can almost hear the scuffed sound of ankle boots on dry grass as the first zoological fellows behold a creation that would unite science, nature and a highly-intrigued society. The enchanted idea that one could expand London’s population to include beasts that were, in the minds of Victorians, as implausible and spectacular as dinosaurs, has lost none of its lustre.

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