Pick up a penguin

I have a bit of a thing for zoos. I know that a lot of people feel they are cruel places, where animals are exploited for profit under a false venire of environmentalism. And to be honest I have a lot of sympathy for that point of view.  But I still like them. I just can’t help myself, they simply appeal to the child in me.
 
I even got married in a zoo.  In the tropical house of Central Park Zoo, New York to be precise (pictures here if you’re interested). We were the first people ever to get married there apparently. And if that weren’t enough, the day after the wedding I persuaded Kerry to visit the Bronx Zoo as well.  Yep, I like my zoos I do.
 
But when I went to London Zoo a few years ago I was very disappointed.  To be fair it never really stood much of a chance, I had placed so many high expectations on it that it could never have lived up to how i imagined it. 
 
In primary school I had a friend called Tom who regularly used to regale me with tales of his visits to London  with his parents.  Of particular fascination were his accounts of the zoo, the Natural History Museum, and Hamley’s – the largest toyshop in the world.  To my spellbound young imagination these seemed like magical and exotic places where all a boys dreams could come true.  Lions so close you could touch them, giant life sized models of blue whales hanging from ceilings, and vast and elaborate displays of every available Star Wars and He-Man figures.  In short, London was paradise.
 
I was about twenty-five when I finally visited the city and, perhaps predictably, everything was a little bit of a let down.  Don’t get me wrong I love the place; the theatres, the underground, the hustle and bustle; it is all exciting and vibrant to a visitor (whether I’d like to actually live there is another matter).  But my childhood dreams were cruelly dashed by my adult cynical eye.  Hamley’s was just a building full of stuffed toys and pokemon cards, the Natural History Museum was just a building full of stuffed animals and fibreglass dodos, and London Zoo contained one of the most depressing buildings I have ever seen in my life.
 
In 1932 Berthold Lubetkin, a Russian modernist architect was commissioned to build the zoo a penguin enclosure.  It’s offcial website describes it as “a modernist building of true clarity and style”.  Then goes on to say it:
 

…cleverly combines practical considerations, such as a shaded area for the penguins and gently sloping access to the pool, with a powerful aesthetic statement of form and line.

I wouldn’t know about that.  AlI saw were a group of miserable looking penguins padding around in a dank and dismal concrete monstrosity. The fluid lines of their bodies were drowned out by the stark “look at me!” bleakness of their enclosure.  I didn’t like it one bit.
 
But poking around the internet this evening I came across an article that stated the Zoo has recently decided that Lubetkin’s pool is no longer suitable for keeping penguins and now lays empty.  Unfortunately it is a grade one listed building and so can’t be razed to the ground.  My advice is just to cover it up with a big sheet and let it rot.  Or maybe they could fill it with a huge Star Wars and He-Man toy display. Either one would be fine.

_{Photo by Sleepless in Somerset used under Creative Commons license.}