Top 30 UK zoos

12-11-2008

Thanks for that bongorob. I'd looked through the report before but must have missed the attendance because it's tucked away in the small print of the financial summary.

12-11-2008

That's exactly the point, for example like Dublin Zoo. The booming Dublin attraction plans new features, with its gorillas set to have their own rainforest.

That approach has driven a major turnaround in the zoo’s fortunes over the past decade, with the zoo doubling in size, a surge in visitor numbers and a boom in the animal population.

The zoo hopes to attract a million visitors this year, up from 905,000 last year, and there are further expansion plans.

It was all very different eight years ago, the press were very negative about the zoo. They wanted to close it down. There were conditions that were unacceptable, and the zoo managed to turn it around.

Currently, work starts on a €4 million development, called Project African Savannah, which will be located in the African Plains area of the zoo gardens.

The zoo will be further expanded next year, when a €4million Gorilla Rainforest will be built to provide a better home for the gorillas.

Both projects are being funded by the Irish Government and by the zoo’s trading surplus.

The zoo was founded in 1830 with animals supplied by London Zoo. During an open day in 1838 to mark the coronation of Queen Victoria, the zoo attracted 20,000 visitors - an attendance record that still stands today.

Almost 180 years on, the zoo has 632 animals from 120 species, 48 of which are mammals. It employs 101 people, about 70 of whom are fulltime employees. This includes 35 keepers, who form the core animal care team, and the horticultural staff.

The zoo also receives government funding, which has totalled about €50 million in the last 15 years.

In 2000, the zoo attracted about 450,000 visitors a year, but the improvements have doubled that. Up to last month, the poor weather had not affected visitor numbers, and the zoo is on target to hit the one million visitor mark for the first time.

For a country with a population of about four million, it is remarkable that they have such high visitor numbers.

When the zoo opened, it covered 30 acres, but today it occupies almost 100 acres. In 2000, President McAleese donated 30 acres of Aras an Uachtaráin demesne in the Phoenix Park to the zoo. It facilitated the major expansion called the African Plains, which is home to giraffes, zebras, white rhinos, ostriches and lions. This was among the reforms set in train by the zoo’s previous director Peter Wilson.

A new elephant habitat, the Kaziranga Forest Trail, opened last year with pools and dense vegetation. That area spreads over 8,000 square metres and houses four female Asian elephants and a baby male elephant, which was born last February.

It took a year to build, at a cost of €8.8 million. The forest trail has been designed as a ‘‘journey of discovery’’ for visitors, especially children, as they find their way through tunnels of foliage and winding paths into the elephant habitat.

12-11-2008

That is a startling amount of facts concerning the Dublin Zoo, and in a few years they might even triple their attendance in comparison to the year 2000. With only 4 million people in the country it just cements the fact that Dublin has turned into a resounding success. London by comparison has 13 million residents, plus millions of tourists, and only now the zoo is scraping up 1 million visitors? It seems disappointing judging by the sheer quantity of humans that are in the general area.

13-11-2008

There are a number of reasons why London Zoo's attendance appears to be comparatively small.

- price. It costs £15.50 (about $23) for an adult ticket, and that's in low season. On average, wildlife attractions are the second most expensive tourist attractions in the UK (after theme parks). Apart from the odd rare exception, they get no government funding.

- competition for tourist income. London is blessed with a massive variety of attractions and entertainment to part tourists (and Londoners) with their money. Most of London's major museums and galleries are free - at least 8 are more popular than the zoo. London Zoo is in the top 10 most popular paid-for attractions in the city, but behind the London Eye, Madame Tussauds, the Tower of London, St Paul's Cathedral and Kew Gardens. A zoo in a smaller city might well be the number one attraction there.

- competition from other wildlife attractions. Within a 75-mile radius of London there are at least 7 major UK zoos: Howletts, Port Lympne, Marwell, Whipsnade, Woburn, Cotswold and Colchester, with a combined annual attendance of over 2.8 million. Add in lesser attractions such as Drusillas and Paradise Wildlife Park, and that figure approaches 3.5 million.

- missing "drawcard" species. London has no bears, no elephants, no rhinos and no wolves.

If you look at national figures, then visits to zoos per head of population are higher in the US than the UK, but not by as much as you'd think. By contrast, European zoos as a whole get only half as many visits per head as US zoos.

13-11-2008

@Chris79: thanks for all of the attendance statistics that you've been firing off on this thread, as I love analyzing them and comparing all of the numbers to other zoos.

What is truly shocking is the distance involved with visiting zoos in North America in comparison to the U.K., or really anywhere across Europe. An individual can literally spend two weeks of driving nonstop every day for 8 hours and only get across Canada! In that entire fortnight there are arguably only 2 notable zoos: Calgary and Toronto. If you read the thread "Snowleopard's Epic Road Trip" you'd have seen that my wife and I spent 8 weeks driving 22,000 km across most of Canada and the U.S. and we saw 30 different zoos and aquariums.

My upcoming Florida road trip involves me arriving in Miami, driving 3.5 hours to Orlando, then 2 hours to Jacksonville, and then 5.5 hours back to Miami. All of that for 4 zoos! If I lived somewhere in Europe I'd have literally visited about 200-300 zoos by now because everything is so close together.

13-11-2008

Another factor in the London Zoo's limited attendance success is its long string of bad years, including its near closure in the 90s, which has tainted its reputation. Many non-zoo fan Londoners I have talked with have a very negative perception of zoos in general, and the Regent's Park zoo in particular. Zoos are not "cool" in London, in drastic comparison to places like Zurich, Prague, or Dublin, were they are.

And its efforts to modernize are clearly resulting in mixed results--"Gorilla Kingdom" is a hideous joke compared with much better gorilla exhibits around the world, and even in the British Isles such effective exhibits as the new elepant complex in Dublin blow London's newest attempts out of the water.

13-11-2008

@snowleopard: Thanks for the compliment. None of this is privileged information, it's just a matter of compiling it. But if you like reading attendance numbers, you'll love this: I'm about to post the 2007 data.

Britain's most popular zoos 2007
13-11-2008

2007 Rank / (2006 Rank) / Zoo Name / Attendance / (% Change)

1 (1) Chester Zoo 1,233,044 (+6%)
2 (2) ZSL London Zoo 1,108,541 (+26%)
3 (3) Longleat House 838,583 (-2%)
4 (4) Edinburgh Zoo 607,000 (+0%)
5 (5) Bristol Zoo Gardens 541,137 (-5%)
6 (7) Twycross Zoo 540,899 (+7%)
7 (6) Marwell Zoo 530,000 (+4%)
8 (10) Paignton Zoo 507,727 (+10%)
9 (9) Monkey World 500,000 (+5%)
10 (12) Knowsley Safari Park 500,000 (+12%)
11 (13) ZSL Whipsnade Zoo 498,456 (+12%)
12 (8) Colchester Zoo 492,535 (+3%)
13 (11) Woburn Safari Park 469,181 (+4%)
14 (-) West Midland Safari Park 450,000 (-)
15 (14) Blair Drummond Safari Park 433,070 (+8%)
16 (15) Blackpool Zoo 335,000 (+5%)
17 (16) Cotswold Wildlife Park 321,375 (+1%)
18 (17) Belfast Zoo 294,935 (+14%)
19 (-) South Lakes Wild Animal Park 252,631 (-)
20 (18) Trentham Monkey Forest 229,000 (+1%)
21 (19) Newquay Zoo 199,121 (+4%)
22 (20) Banham Zoo 197,944 (+4%)
23 (24) Dudley Zoo 192,033 (+37%)
24 (21) WWT Slimbridge 186,959 (+6%)
25 (22) Port Lympne Wild Animal Park 179,175 (+3%)
26 (26) Durrell Wildlife Trust 169,000 (+37%)
27 (23) Africa Alive! 145,851 (+1%)
28 (25) Welsh Mountain Zoo 145,000 (+5%)
29 (28) Noah's Ark Zoo Farm 123,097 (+15%)
30 (27) Birdworld 122,228 (+5%)
31 (29) Thrigby Hall Wildlife Gardens 85,061 (-7%)
32 (30) Shepreth Wildlife Park 83,058 (+15%)
33 (-) Birdland 80,577 (-)
34 (31) Highland Wildlife Park 67,000 (-1%)

Notes:
1. Sources - Visit Britain attractions survey, Charity Commission & press articles
2. Monkey World and Knowsley both report "over 500,000" visitors, but no exact data could be found.
3. Where 2006 Rank is shown as (-), no previous data could be found.
4. This is not a complete list because not all zoos publicise attendance data - see commentary below.
5. In some cases the 2006 Rank and % Change is based on data from an earlier year, because no 2006 data could be found. This applies to Monkey World, Dudley, Durrell (all 2005) and Knowlsey (2002).

Commentary on 2007 data
13-11-2008

Despite the wet summer, wildlife attractions as a whole had a good year in 2007 with attendances up 4%. Some zoos reached all-time record attendances, notably Belfast, Paignton, Marwell, Knowsley Safari Park and South Lakes. But perhaps the most impressive performance overall was by ZSL's two attractions, London Zoo (up 26%) and Whipsnade Zoo (up 12%) which added 275k visitors between them. The opening of Gorilla Kingdom at London Zoo boosted numbers to more than 1 million for the first time in 16 years. London's surge could not prevent Chester Zoo maintaining the top spot with another impressive year, no doubt helped by the opening of Realm of the Red Ape.

Further down the table, both Dudley Zoo and Durrell performed well, but the % change is over 2 years rather than 1 because I don't have 2006 data for either zoo. In Dudley's case, it is also something of a rebound after declining attendances over the last few years.

Also of note is the continuing popularity of the UK's 5 safari parks, all of which feature in the top 15. Longleat still leads the way, but the reported figures cover all the attractions there, not just entries to the safari park. The others all pull in 430-500k visitors: a remarkably consistent performance.

The only major zoo to lose visitors was Bristol, perhaps as a result of its fast developing neighbour, Noah's Ark, which also hit a record high. Next year, Bristol could well fall out of the top 5. And just look at the performance of Trentham Monkey Forest: 229k visitors with just 1 species!

I decided to remove the data for the three UK theme parks with zoos (Flamingo Land, Chessington and Drayton Manor) because for the zoo is not the main draw of these attractions, and 2 of them don't publicise attendance figures anyway. They generally hover just over the 1 million mark.

I have also left out public aquaria, again because of the difficulty of finding attendance figures. What is true though is that a lot of UK aquaria have opened in the last 10-15 years, and their initial high attendances invariably decline after the first couple of years.

A handful of zoos haven't reported data and are missing from the list, most notably Howletts (450,000 visitors in 2005,ranked #12 in the UK), Paradise Wildlife Park (223,857 in 2003, #20) and Combe Martin (210,000 in 2006, #21). Other missing zoos include Cricket St Thomas (96,448 in 2005, #32), Drusillas (which I think would rank in the top 20), Dartmoor, Linton, Hamerton and a whole host of smaller establishments. If anybody can supply me with numbers for them, I'd be grateful!

14-11-2008

Thanks for that information Chris...

I think the most surprising figure for me is Trentham Monkey Forest which is amazingly high for a 'one species' attraction in my opinion...

14-11-2008

That's great Chris. It's nice to see so many zoos having increased attendances.

14-11-2008

Brilliant! Thanks a lot Chris, and I'll be saving those numbers onto a file for further reference.

14-11-2008

Thanks Chris for yet another interesting read. I see most zoo's bar a few seem to be increasing year by year, im quite suprised with all the developments though that Highland Park actaully decreased a bit.

15-11-2008

I would expect an increase at the HWP this year, but I think the overall figures for 2008 will show a downward trend. London and Chester certainly haven't made any press releases about passing 1 million visitors yet, which they both had at this stage last year.

15-11-2008

I'm guessing that is because of the current economic climate and the fact that neither Chester and London have opened a mega exhibit this year (cheetahs or birds won't draw in the same visitor numbers as Orangs and Gorillas)

Edit: and the horrible summer we've had may have put off the ususal fair weather visitors