Edinburgh Zoo is a zoological park in Corstorphine, Edinburgh, Scotland which opened on 22 July 1913. Edinburgh had previously been home to a zoological garden which failed to thrive. The new zoo is owned and run by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and initially opened as the Scottish National Zoological Park. Modern zoological methods allowed animals to survive in Edinburgh's cold climate. Edinburgh is the only zoo in the United Kingdom to be incorporated by royal charter, and was the first zoo in the world to house and breed penguins. The zoo's penguins have been famous throughout its history, and since the 1950s have performed a daily parade around the park. The zoo was largely unaffected by war, though some animals were euthanised for safety reasons during the Second World War. After the war the park housed a brown bear named Wojtek who had served with the Polish military. In 1972 one of the zoo's king penguins was adopted by the Norwegian military. In the 21st century Edinburgh Zoo was briefly forced to close by the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak, and in 2005 received threats from the Animal Liberation Front. In 2000 a plan for the complete redevelopment of the zoo was begun.
Precursors Scotland's first zoo was called The Royal Edinburgh Zoological Gardens, and predated the modern Edinburgh Zoo by some 70 years. After the death of James Donaldson, a wealthy Scottish publisher and bookseller, the gardens of his country house, Broughton Hall (the area now covered by Bellevue) were converted into a zoological park. Occupying a 6-acre (2.4 ha) site, the park was situated about a mile to the north-east of Central Edinburgh, near East Claremont Street. Naturalist John Graham Dalyell was one of the original promoters of the project and eventually president of the board of directors. The Zoological Gardens opened in 1839 with a collection of stock zoo animals including lions, tigers, monkeys, bears and an elephant. At the time, animals in zoos were typically held in poor conditions in small, cramped cages, and the Zoological Gardens presented no exception. As a result, its animals were frequently afflicted by disease, and also suffered from the harsh easterly winds of the Edinburgh climate. Despite these setbacks, the menagerie attempted to maintain its popularity by putting on concerts, acrobatics shows and displays of fireworks and Montgolfier balloons. Children were carried around the park on the back of the zoo's elephant, giving it a rare opportunity for exercise. Even with these entertainments, the Zoological Gardens were eventually forced to admit defeat. The park was closed and the site developed as tenement flats in 1857. Nothing now remains of the house or its gardens.
Foundation
Edinburgh Zoo was created by Thomas Haining Gillespie, a solicitor from Dumfries who dreamed of establishing a zoological park in Scotland. At first he was told that tropical animals would never be able to live in a cold climate like Edinburgh's—a view that had to some extent been borne out by the failure of the Royal Zoological Gardens. In 1908, though, he was encouraged to read of the pioneering methods employed by Carl Hagenbeck, which were allowing tropical animals to thrive in the recently opened Tierpark Hagenbeck in Hamburg, Germany. In 1909, Gillespie and others founded a registered charity which was to become the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland. The Society's first president was lawyer and politician Edward Theodore Salvesen, son of the Norwegian merchant Christian Salveson—a connection which would prove significant in later years. A series of lectures given to the society by J. Arthur Thomson gave yet more momentum to the modern approach being spearheaded by Hagenbeck in Germany.
All that remained was to find a suitable site for the new zoo. Gillespie hoped for a site with plenty of sun and with shelter from the north and east winds. He also intended the zoo to be cheaply and quickly accessible via public transport. The society secured an option to purchase the 75-acre (30 ha) Corstorphine Hill House estate for £17,000. The house had been built in 1793 as the home of Scottish accountant William Keith. Its current Scottish Baronial architecture is mostly thanks to remodelling by the Macmillan family in 1891. The zoological society found they were having difficulty gathering the necessary funds before the approaching expiry of the purchase option. Edinburgh City Council stepped in, purchasing the site outright in February 1913. The zoological society was granted full use of the estate in return for a 4 percent annual repayment of the cost. A further £8,000, raised with the help of the society's members, was set aside for the construction and stocking of the park. Initially the zoo occupied only the southernmost 27 acres (11 ha), while the land to the north was used as a golf course. The park was designed by town planner Patrick Geddes and his son-in-law Frank Mears. Following Gillespie's vision, they modeled the park after the open designs of zoos like the New York Zoological Park and Hagenbeck's zoo in Hamburg. These modern zoological parks promoted a more spacious and natural environment for the animals, and stood in stark contrast to the steel cages typical of the menageries built during the Victorian era. The Scottish National Zoological Park, as it was initially called, opened to the public with a large collection of donated and borrowed animals on 22 July 1913, after only 15 weeks of work. The zoo still occupies very much the same area of land today, though the park is being extensively redeveloped.
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