2025: A year in review at the Zoo

This year brought much to celebrate at Battersea Park Children’s Zoo, not only thanks to our amazing team, but because of you!

Thanks to our incredible members, visitors and supporters, we were able to continue to build on our important conservation and education commitments.

2025 marked 20 years since Battersea Park Children's Zoo was rescued from closure by the Heap family, and reimagined as the conservation zoo we know and love today. We celebrated with a special film to mark the anniversary and ran a week of celebrations across the May half term.

Our rare breed conservation work saw the birth of 9 Oxford Sandy & Black piglets at the zoo as part of the official breed society studbook. With fewer than 500 registered individuals remaining, we are proud to play our part in saving this breed from extinction.

We launched our first-ever conservation and education strategies, outlining our achievements and goals between now and 2030. These strategies demonstrate how our zoo will adapt to achieve our mission, preventing biodiversity loss and educating the next generation of conservationists.

This year, our honeybee school project in partnership with the London Beekeepers Association surpassed an incredible milestone; we have now welcomed over 700 London school children, free of charge, to engage in the School Food Matters honeybee programme here at our zoo apiary!

Easter 2025 saw us open the Little Cheeps Nursery for the first time! Visitors enjoyed meeting our rare breed chicks, watching them hatch in the incubator, and learning about the importance of rare and heritage breeds.

2025 was an amazing year for our education team as they welcomed over 5300 school children to the zoo as part of our education programme!

In March we were awarded a grant from the London beekeepers association to establish a native pollinator trail at the zoo to support native invertebrates onsite whilst also inspiring our visitors to join us in improving pollinator habitats.

We officially joined the London City Farm Yarn Project, working with 10 city farms to save rare and heritage sheep fleece by collecting 596 fleeces (1.192 tonnes) and transforming them into 350kg of beautiful natural yarn.

We proudly won a BIAZA award within the PR, Marketing, Digital & Events category for the #ShareSavvy campaign!

We welcomed Battersea MP Marsha de Cordova on an official visit, where we shared our conservation and education initiatives, education programme and #ShareSavvy campaign, while highlighting the vital role small zoos play in biodiversity, education, and community engagement.

We regularly hosted WWF-UK fundraisers at the zoo, allowing them to secure over £40,185 in donations! This incredible amount, thanks to our generous visitors, will help the charity support a whole host of organisations across the globe protecting species and their habitats.

At the start of 2025, zoo manager Jamie, and senior keeper Lizzy were invited to the Houses of Parliament to represent the zoo at the Great British Wildlife Restoration Award.

Jamie and Lizzy were also honoured to attend a special reception at the House of Lords, invited by the ICCF, alongside indigenous community leaders from Southern Africa to highlight the vital link between conservation and indigenous communities and the importance of working in partnership for lasting success.

In September, we hosted a workshop with the Small Zoo Network, welcoming delegates from small zoos across the U.K. to connect, collaborate, and share some of our proudest work.

We reintroduced more Eurasian harvest mice back to the wild from our breeding programme in collaboration with our project partners, Ealing Wildlife Group. This amazing project has now seen over 3000 individuals of this threatened species released into restored habitats in West London.

Our senior keeper, Lizzy Humphries, was named a runner-up in the prestigious BIAZA Woman of the Year Awards!

We saw a number of exciting births across the zoo, including baby meerkats, Laos forest scorpions, casque-headed iguana, and many many harvest mouse babies!

2025 saw more incredible species of conservation concern join the zoo, including Patagonian mara and roul-roul partridge. We also welcomed new animals as part of our conservation breeding programmes, including a male Scottish wildcat, prehensile-tailed skink, a male Bagot goat and a female emperor tamarin!

Education manager, Gemma Cathie, has designed our brand new home education programme! With the current 2026 sessions almost fully booked, this practical, engaging workshop was created specifically for home educated children.

This December, we opened our gates after dark for Winter Nights at the Zoo! Across 5 festive nights, guests enjoyed exclusive animal talks by lantern light, amazing performances and seasonal food and drinks!

We couldn’t be more excited to continue with our mission as we approach 2026, and our 75th birthday!

With many exciting projects planned for the year ahead, we cannot wait to see what we achieve in the new year.

THANK YOU again for all of your ongoing support, we wish you all a happy and healthy new year.

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