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Twycross Zoo

Twycross Zoo, on the Leicestershire–Warwickshire border

Location Profile
Type Zoo & conservation charity
County Leicestershire, near the Warwickshire border
Founded 26 May 1963
Founders Molly Badham MBE & Nathalie Evans
Known For The ‘World Primate Centre’; PG Tips chimpanzee adverts
First Appearance Cambion, Chapter Twenty-Two: Exits and Entrances

Twycross Zoo

Zoo and conservation charity in Leicestershire, the ‘World Primate Centre’.

Overview

Twycross Zoo is a 100-acre zoo and conservation charity near Norton Juxta Twycross, on the Leicestershire side of the Leicestershire–Warwickshire border. Founded in 1963, it is the only zoo in the United Kingdom, and one of very few anywhere, to house all four species of great ape — chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos — a reputation that has earned it recognition as the ‘World Primate Centre’.

For much of the twentieth century it was better known for something else entirely: its chimpanzees were the stars of one of British television's longest-running and most recognisable advertising campaigns, for PG Tips tea.

Geography & Atmosphere

The zoo sits at almost the exact meeting point of four English counties — Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire — on the southern edge of the small village of Norton Juxta Twycross, itself named for its position ‘next to’ the larger village of Twycross two miles away, whose own name comes from a staggered crossroads where three old routes once met. The zoo is reached off the A444, itself accessible from the M42 at Junction 11, putting it within reasonable striking distance of Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham and Derby alike — a genuinely central Midlands location that belies its quiet, single-village postal address of Atherstone.

The zoo occupies the grounds of a former Victorian rectory, its original farm buildings and stables long since converted into animal houses, its car park and paths spreading out across what were once open fields. It has the particular, slightly ramshackle atmosphere of an attraction that grew organically over sixty years rather than one built to a masterplan — weathered brick alongside modern glasshouses, a sagging fence here and there, everything a little worn at the edges despite the seriousness of the conservation work going on behind it.

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History

Molly Badham and Nathalie Evans began as business rivals, running competing pet shops in Sutton Coldfield in the 1940s; Molly first saw a monkey in the window of Nathalie's shop in 1949, and the two joined forces soon after. They kept their growing primate collection in a shared flat before establishing the Hints Zoological Gardens, near Tamworth, Staffordshire, in 1954. Having outgrown that site, they bought Norton Grange — a red-brick Victorian rectory with twelve acres of land, plus farm buildings and stables — in 1962, and opened it to the public as Twycross Zoo on the Whitsun bank holiday, 26 May 1963. Badham and Evans became, in the process, the United Kingdom's first female zoo founders.

PG Tips & the Chimps' Tea Party

Badham and Evans had trained their chimpanzees to act out mock tea parties, a novelty that caught the attention of the Brooke Bond tea company, who contracted the animals for a long-running series of PG Tips television adverts — dressed in clothes, riding bicycles, playing at being human, in a format that ran for roughly thirty years. Chimpanzees including ‘Mr Shifter’ became genuinely famous faces, appearing not only in the adverts but on children's programmes such as Blue Peter and Tiswas, and, in one instance, alongside Peter Cushing in a Hammer Horror film.

The revenue the adverts generated helped fund the zoo's conservation work for decades, but the practice of dressing and training chimpanzees for entertainment is now regarded, including by the zoo's own current management, as having been wrong; the arrangement with Brooke Bond ended in the early 1980s, though chimpanzees from elsewhere continued to appear in tea advertising until 2003. Choppers, rescued as an infant from poachers in Liberia in 1973 and one of the original television chimps, lived at Twycross until her death in 2016, spending her final years, after decades in front of cameras, simply learning to behave as a chimpanzee among the zoo's other apes.

Conservation & the World Primate Centre

The zoo became a charitable trust, the East Midland Zoological Society, in 1972, formalising a shift away from entertainment and toward breeding and conservation that had already been under way for years. Twycross has recorded first UK births for thirteen primate species, including the bonobo, siamang, agile gibbon and woolly monkey, and remains home to the UK's only group of bonobos. Beyond primates, the collection has grown to include elephants, big cats, giraffes and reptiles, with critically endangered species such as the Sumatran tiger and the eastern black rhinoceros now part of a collection that, across the past decade alone, has bred more than seventy species and put upwards of £450,000 directly into global conservation projects.

Role in the Saga — Cambion spoilers Covers the last of three deliberate day trips in Chapter Twenty-Two.

Twycross Zoo is the third and last of the trips Toby Knight arranges in Chapter Twenty-Two: Exits and Entrances, following Blackpool and Alton Towers. The zoo looks tired from the outside — weathered brick, a sagging fence, a faded cartoon gorilla over the gate, the car park turned to standing water by recent rain — and Robert is given the choice of primates or the petting zoo at the entrance. He chooses primates.

The chimp enclosure holds his attention first: one chimp sits utterly still, unhurriedly shredding a leaf, and meets Robert's stare without blinking even as a nearby child shrieks and slaps the glass. Ben quietly shields him from the noise without being asked. At the gibbons, Toby reads from the signboard and demonstrates brachiation; in the Tropical House, heat and wet air close in at once around tamarins, fruit bats and a wooden bridge over a turtle pond, Toby lingering at each enclosure while Ben leads the way.

The reptile house holds the chapter's most unsettling beat. Behind glass, an alligator lies so still it could be mistaken for a sculpture — until its eyes open, and fix on Robert, old and patient and waiting. In his own reflection in the glass, something shifts: not wrong, exactly, but altered, as if whatever was looking back had heard him thinking and hurried to wear his own face before he noticed. It lasts less than a second, and the reflection settles back into his own. Robert understands, without being able to say so, that the creature was not watching him so much as seeing him — seeing exactly what three weekends of day trips have been built around outrunning.

Ben, misreading the moment entirely, checks the thickness of the glass and the seal at its frame and murmurs that it's secure, that nothing is getting out of there — reassurance aimed at the alligator, when Robert's fear was never the alligator at all. Robert says nothing — he has learned, over the three trips, that the things he cannot explain are exactly the things Ben most needs to be able to fix, and that some things cannot be fixed, only stood next to.

The rest of the visit settles back into ordinary warmth: the children's farm, where a goat's tongue against his palm startles a real, unguarded laugh out of him; the conservation centre, where a rehabilitating kestrel grips a handler's glove; the gift shop, where he chooses a rubber snake and a pencil topped with a grinning monkey while Ben counts out the cash. At the gate, Ben's eyes flick across the car park — one, two, three — the same automatic check he runs everywhere, before the turnstile clicks them through and the three weekends of trips come quietly to an end.

Trivia

  • Twycross's association with PG Tips ran for roughly thirty years before ending in the early 1980s; the zoo's own management now describes the use of dressed, performing chimpanzees as wrong, even as the revenue it generated once funded much of the collection's early conservation work.
  • Twycross remains the only UK zoo, and one of the few anywhere in the world, to hold all four great ape species — and the only one in the country with a breeding group of bonobos.
  • The zoo's founders, Molly Badham and Nathalie Evans, met as business rivals running competing pet shops in the same town, joining forces only after Molly spotted a monkey in Nathalie's shop window in 1949.

Appearances

Title Role Notes
Cambion
Book One · Book of Thoth Saga		 Day-trip setting The last of three deliberate excursions in Chapter Twenty-Two: Exits and Entrances, including the chapter's most unsettling quiet moment, at the reptile house.