I took my son on a private tour of London's ‘other' zoo
I t says something for my eight-year-old son's sense of reality, or perhaps timidity, that the thought of seeing actual lemurs in south London held greater appeal than fake dinosaurs.
A half-term trip to Battersea took us past the Jurassic World Experience in the shadow of Gilbert Scott's power station, where many a boy would have begged to go, but Humphrey was much keener on getting to the zoo to see Maurice from Madagascar and his five children. We found the lemurs lounging on the roof of the first hut, staring at us with those hypnotic, deep orange eyes.
The zoo in Regent's Park is London's best known, but there has been one this side of the river, barely 100 yards from the Thames, since 1951, when a menagerie was created for the Festival of Britain. Wandsworth council then ran the site before selling it in 2004 to Roger and Carol Heap, who owned a wildlife sanctuary in Derbyshire and have since relocated to the New Forest. The zoo reopened 20 years ago this month.
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