About Us
Tom Jones is the co-founder of the Save Bristol Zoo Gardens Campaign. Tom is a professional musician, parent of two young children and lifelong Bristol resident. Since May 2022, he has been researching, writing and campaigning to save Bristol Zoo Gardens.
Tom co-founded the SBZG campaign with Alastair Sawday and Iain Boyd in late 2022 and until May 2023, they worked on the campaign together. But after Bristol Zoological Society was awarded provisional planning permission for its housing development in April 2023, Alastair and Iain decided to go their separate ways after differences emerged over what they wanted for the future of the site.
After being delayed because of being diagnosed with cancer and spending the large part of a year recovering from surgery and having chemotherapy and radiotherapy, Tom wrote a 2nd report about Bristol Zoo Gardens which analyses its closure as well as the projections upon which Bristol Zoological Society’s current one site strategy is based. It finds almost all the projections to be unprecedented and therefore, highly questionable.
On April 16th 2025, Tom relaunched the Save Bristol Zoo Gardens campaign with a petition calling for the current BZS leadership to stand down and for the developer, Acorn Property Group, to withdraw its bid to buy Bristol Zoo for luxury housing. He organised a public event at Bristol Beacon on April 29th to present the alternative vision for a reimagined Bristol Zoo Gardens, featuring international experts and former Bristol Zoo staff. 35,000 flyers had been distributed to homes around Bristol advertising the meeting but the event was cancelled by Bristol Beacon with only a week's notice. A subsequent Subject Access Request revealed that Bristol Zoological Society's CEO had emailed the Beacon's CEO just hours before the cancellation.
The day after the Beacon meeting was officially cancelled, Tom received a legal letter from BZS lawyers which reserved their rights in respect of defamation if he continued to make “inaccurate and misleading” comments about the charity. Despite this, Tom continues to campaign on this issue on behalf of the many thousands of people who support this campaign.
As a result of his work and unprecedented insight, Tom passionately believes Bristol Zoological Society should retain its historic site and reopen Bristol Zoo Gardens in a reimagined form and once again run it alongside the Bristol Zoo Project as a complementary attraction. Tom’s report strongly argues based on huge amounts of new evidence that this is in the long-term best interests of Bristol Zoological Society, its conservation goals and its charitable objects. The vision for a reimagined Bristol Zoo Gardens which has been developed by Save Bristol Zoo Gardens with many industry experts and ex-Bristol Zoo staff provides a pathway for the Society out of its current self-declared "crisis" to being a successful Zoological Society once more.