I was re-reading one of my favourite novels, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson (published 1956), and came upon a passage that sparked my interest. The hero is walking in Hyde Park, where he 'observed the steel-like claws of the crane that scratched in the little stream behind the Serpentine'. My question is, does anyone know if cranes were ever kept here in reality? Wilson was clearly interested in animals and animal collections (one of his novels, The Old Men at the Zoo, is specifically about London Zoo), so it seems an oddly specific reference to make if cranes were not, in fact, kept here at some point in the 50s.