What’s Happened So Far?
In May 2022, Tom Jones took his (then) 4-year-old son to Bristol Zoo Gardens. As they walked around on an especially luminous day he found himself appreciating, truly how beautiful and precious the gardens are, what a unique and historic site it is and the significance of its place in Bristol’s history and culture. He reflected on the imminent closure and could not believe that where he was standing was intended to become someone’s multi-million pound home and wondered why no one else had made any serious attempt to stop this from happening.
When he had first heard the fateful news that Bristol Zoo Gardens was to close on November 27th 2020, his first thought was, “It’s not going to happen, someone will step in and do something, because it literally, cannot happen. Bristol Zoo Gardens cannot close.” But almost two years later on that Thursday afternoon in May 2022 and after much soul-searching, he finally realised that no one else was going to do anything. So in that moment, he decided that he would at least try. He didn’t know what, he just knew he had to do something.
He subsequently undertook hundreds (running into thousands) of hours of research into Bristol Zoological Society’s annual reports, accounts and strategic plans to understand the sudden change in direction. It was very much a labour of love as he is a professional musician and parent of young children, not an investigative journalist, so consequently, a lot of the work was done in the early hours. He started making notes on all the research he was doing and wrote a blog which he posted online. He also started the petition ‘Save Bristol Zoological Gardens from Becoming a Private Housing Estate’ whilst his wife was in labour with their 2nd child; safe to say she was not happy, but he did stop well before the baby came!
Up until that point, he had casually spoken to many staff members at Bristol Zoo Gardens whilst visiting regularly and he had continually picked up on the fact that something just wasn’t right about the impending closure. One person he spoke to said she would feedback his disillusionment with the decision to close and sell the zoo. But equally, he knew that feedback would go nowhere and make no difference. He knew he had to do more but also knew that he needed access, inside information, if he was going to get anywhere. After trying and failing with a few different staff members, the breakthrough came just a couple of weeks before the zoo closed in late August 2022, when he received a message on Facebook from someone who had seen his blog and petition online. At that stage, Tom didn’t know for sure if they worked for the zoo, but he suspected they did. The message simply said that like him, they cared very much about the site and wanted to speak. They agreed to meet a few days later on the bench opposite the lions at 3.30pm. As Tom sat down at 3.25pm, he felt like he was in a movie, looking out for someone but not quite knowing who. As they approached and he caught their eye, Tom realised they were a senior staff member from what they were wearing. They only talked for 10 minutes as they said they were taking a serious risk by talking to him at all. They told Tom that having read what he’d written online, he was "way ahead of the game" and that many people within the Society were "deeply unhappy" with what had been going on, but couldn’t speak out publicly because of fear of retribution, or because many staff had signed quasi-NDAs, precluding them from talking about the zoo’s closure. The staff member said that although they couldn’t speak out themselves, they wanted to help Tom get the truth out there because “you have a voice”. They agreed to meet properly at the Alma Tavern the following week and just days before Bristol Zoo’s very last day.
The Alma Tavern where Tom first met disgruntled Bristol Zoo employees
After that first meeting at the Alma where another staff member joined as well, they met up regularly and developed a close working relationship which subsequently became a friendship. The information Tom was able to elicit as well as the questions he could finally ask and have answered led to Tom writing a report, investigating the reasons behind the decision to close Bristol Zoo Gardens.
One of the first things a gorilla keeper who talked to Tom said was; "The best thing for that gorilla family is for it to stay put in Clifton in the home that they know and feel comfortable in. If they try and move Jock, it's very likely he won't survive the move." Over three years on, that statement is all the more poignant since Jock died within days of leaving Clifton.
Tom was initially motivated by a very strong feeling that closing the world’s 5th oldest zoo and selling it off to become a private housing estate was unacceptable, but from his continuing research and as he talked to staff and heard their stories, he was also driven on by an informed belief that a great injustice had been perpetrated. Although he still believes that as strongly as he did then, the past few years have been an extraordinary journey of discovery. Tom has now spent several thousand hours working on this, along the way talking to over forty Bristol Zoological Society employees, both past and present, current and former Bristol Zoological Society Trustees, as well as an array of internationally renowned zoological and conservation experts.
The petition ‘Save Bristol Zoological Gardens From Becoming a Private Housing Estate’ to date has 12,901 signatories (and counting) and Tom co-founded the ‘Save Bristol Zoo Gardens Campaign’ (SBZG) with Alastair Sawday and Iain Boyd which, amongst other things, helped generate over 500 objections to Bristol Zoo’s planning application for its private housing development. The SBZG campaign also staged two public meetings - one of which was chaired by Alice Roberts - to raise awareness of its campaign and also organised and led a protest march in objection to BZS’s plans to sell its historic site for private housing.
The first SBZG public meeting was chaired by Professor Alice Roberts
The second SBZG public meeting drew a standing room only crowd in Christ Church, Clifton on 22nd February, 2023
All of this inspired one of the many disgruntled Bristol Zoological Society Shareholders to transfer one of their shares to Tom, to help him further his quest to save Bristol Zoo Gardens.
On April 16th 2025, Tom relaunched the Save Bristol Zoo Gardens campaign with a new 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 and turn it into private 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 event 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.
From his enlightened position almost four years on, Tom believes it is beyond reasonable doubt that Bristol Zoological Society’s current strategy to sell Bristol Zoo Gardens and invest everything it has, including the entire proceeds from its prize asset, into Bristol Zoo Project (formerly Wild Place) at Cribbs Causeway – is a huge strategic error, which far from ensuring the long term survival of Bristol Zoological Society, now exposes the Society to genuine existential risk, as demonstrated by the Society's recent self-declared "crisis."
No-one can predict the future, but all the evidence suggests that judged by the very high standards that Bristol Zoological Society has set for itself, this is a project destined to end in failure. The story continues...