Why London's Famous Penguin Pool Has No Penguins In It

A Tale From My Trip To The Zoo

Harry Styles in the Penguin Pool at London Zoo

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Over Easter weekend, my family and I had a sleepover at London Zoo. It was a blast. You get a little lodge to yourselves. In the evening, after the general public has been shooed away, you and the other sleepover guests get taken on a private tour of the zoo by the zookeepers. Then dinner, and back to your cabin. After being woken by a dawn chorus of animal noises, it’s breakfast followed by another tour, after which you’re free to roam.

The children (mine are 9 and 11) absolutely loved it. We all learnt a lot, because our hosts were so knowledgeable about the species we visited. The zoo is run by ZSL, a science-based conservation charity, which works towards the preservation of wildlife populations around the world.

I won’t go into the arguments for and against zoos here, but suffice to say that if you were to spend five minutes with one of these zookeepers, your concerns would likely be assuaged, both because of what you learn about how zoos like this one help to preserve endangered species, and because of how the keepers relate to the animals. Quite simply, they love them, and put a great deal of thought into keeping them healthy and happy.

But I’m not here to tell you about the tour, or the animals. I want to tell you about the Penguin Pool, a very elegant structure in the middle of London Zoo which hasn’t had any penguins in it for twenty years. It is now an empty enclosure, unused except by Harry Styles, a curio for puzzled visitors - a specimen of that not-so-rare species, the white elephant.

The Penguin Pool was built in 1934 to a design by a brilliant Georgian architect called Berthold Lubetkin. Lubetkin, an emigré to England from the Soviet Union, was a pioneering young modernist, influenced by Le Corbusier. His design for the pool was daringly experimental. The pool’s geometrically balanced, elliptical structure is built entirely of reinforced concrete, rendered in white cement. Its centrepiece is that pair of gracefully interlocking, miraculously unsupported spiral ramps (engineered by Ove Arup).

Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool became internationally renowned as a masterpiece of modernism, and is still celebrated among the architectural community. In 2016, the V&A Museum described it as “a new direction for British architecture, [and] also one of the first to demonstrate the expressive and structural potential of reinforced concrete.”

But unfortunately, the Penguin Pool never worked very well as a habitat for penguins. It kept having to be adapted, compromising the original design. By the 1980s the building was in a state of considerable dereliction and was subject to a major restoration project, carried out by the architect John Allan, and overseen by Lubetkin and Arup, both in their eighties. The rubber and cork floor of the pool was replaced by concrete and quartz, but this made things worse. The concrete was bad for the penguins, who developed bumblefoot, a kind of arthritis of the feet caused by micro-abrasions.

There were other problems, unsolved by the restoration. Penguins like to dive, but can hardly do so in a pool that is 40cm deep. The building is very echoey, which was originally seen as a feature, since it made a relatively small number of penguins sound like a lot, to visitors. But penguins use vocalisations to identify their mates and offspring - each penguin has a unique call - and the echoes played havoc with the signals. The building’s designers fondly imagined that the penguins might like to play on the ramps and even slide down them, but they didn’t, indeed had they done so they would have slid into a wall.

The truth is that the Penguin Pool was never really built for penguins. John Allan has written:

Contrary to the convention of simulating natural surroundings for captive animals, Lubetkin’s objective was not literally to recreate the avian habitat of an emperor penguin but rather to suggest a metaphor for Antarctica in a miniature cameo that both expressed the animals’ natural characteristics and also fully acknowledged, indeed celebrated, the human artifice involved. The enclosure’s perimeter is even inscribed within slotted proscenium screens as if to dramatize the theatrical connotation.

As it turns out, it’s not much fun for an animal to live in a human metaphor. Over the years, zoos have become progressively more animal-centric. Greater attention is paid to what makes the animals happy, rather than to what humans might find amusing. One way to put this is that modern zoos work by analogy, not metaphor: they create spaces that are like the habitat of the animal in the wild, rather than evocative of it in some clever way. The Galápagos tortoises at London Zoo are kept in a temperature and moisture-controlled building which tracks the weather in the Galápagos Islands. The zoo’s penguins now live on a recreation of a South American beach (with a deep pool).

Our zookeeper guides told us about the Penguin Pool with a mixture of amusement and exasperation. The zoo has very limited space, and what they would really like to do with the space that the Penguin Pool takes up is to put animals in it. That’s what zoos are for, after all. But they can’t, because the Pool is now a Grade 1 Listed Building, which means it can’t be demolished, or modified. The zoo has tried putting the Penguin Pool to other uses: it housed Chinese alligators there for a short while, but that didn’t work out, partly because it was uncomfortably close to the children’s playground.

It’s hard to know what to do about it. Lubetkin’s daughter, Sasha Lubetkin, has suggested it be demolished: "It was designed as a showcase and playground of captive penguins, and I can't see that it would be suited to anything else. Perhaps it's time to blow it to smithereens." John Allan wrote to the Evening Standard to disagree, which prompted George Osborne, then editor of the Standard, to reply in agreement with him. Osborne said that to destroy the Penguin Pool would be “an act of cultural vandalism”.

He also made a slightly strange comparison. Allan had written that the original plan, if followed, was animal-friendly. Osborne said, "Your observation that the original plan, if followed, would have been more animal-friendly reminds me of plenty of projects in politics that on paper look perfect but in practice are a fiasco. Brexit, anyone?" Osborne accepted the pool can’t be used for animals, but advised the zoo to “be imaginative” (I love this, it’s the kind of thing clients say to ad agencies when landing them an impossible problem - just be creative!).

The Penguin Pool raises the old question of whether architects design buildings for those who live in them, or for themselves. The architects who inspired Lubetkin, like Le Corbusier and Gropius, believed in the maxim, “form follows function”. If a building’s design is rooted in its purpose, then beauty will naturally follow. But as those who have lived in grim modernist housing estates have testified, an architect’s idea of function is often a rather impoverished one, and always seems to err in the direction of their own aesthetic preferences.

The Penguin Pool is conserved and acclaimed despite its failure to fulfil its primary purpose. It is undoubtedly beautiful, but its beauty is now entirely detached from utility. We shouldn’t necessarily blame Lubetkin for that. An ardent socialist, Lubetkin sincerely believed that buildings should serve those who use them, and in a sense, the Penguin Pool did serve its users, as defined in 1934: humans. Over time, zoos have come to define the user differently - as the animal, as much as, or more so, than the visitor. Lubetkin’s pool is obsolete for good reason.

On the other hand, maybe we should blame the penguins for failing to appreciate good design.

Penguins inspect a model of the pool, in 1933. Photo taken by Lubetkin.