Bristol Zoo housing development confirmed as council and zoo bosses reach agreement

Council chiefs have formally agreed to give planning permission to develop the closed-down site of Bristol Zoo in Clifton, and set in law how the famous gardens will be managed and opened up to the public in the future.

City Hall planners have reached an agreement with bosses at the Bristol Zoological Society on all the conditions and the legal Section 106 agreement that had to be sorted out in the months after councillors controversially voted to give permission for the zoo site to be developed for new housing.

Bristol Live understands an agreement is already in place between the zoo and a housing developer to sell the site and transform the gardens site with 196 new homes, a conservation hub and open public gardens, but those behind the project might have to wait a few more months before things can get started, as a legal challenge is expected from those who have opposed the scheme.

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The zoo closed to the public on September 1, 2022, and councillors voted to give planning permission for the redevelopment in principle at the end of April 2023. In the 14 months since, council planning officers, zoo bosses and their consultants have been working through the conditions of that agreement, and in particular the way in which the gardens that won’t be built on will be preserved, managed and maintained to be open to the public as a privately-owned park.

Last week, Bristol Zoo announced work had begun on the Central African Forest habitat at its new base at the Bristol Zoo Project in the countryside on the outskirts of Bristol at Easter Compton - which they hope will open in a year’s time and be the new home for the zoo’s troop of gorillas.

Those gorillas still live in the Clifton Zoo Gardens site, and won’t be moved until their new home is ready. In the famous zoo gardens site, which had been the world’s oldest provincial zoo and was open from 1836 to 2022, the edges of the gardens will be developed with new blocks of flats and homes - with 196 built in the coming years.

The gardens that remain will be run by a management committee and management board that will include residents who live in the new homes, the Bristol Zoological Society itself, which will still have a presence in a ‘Conservation Hub’ based in the old admissions building, and it will also include representatives of local residents living around the zoo site.

Many who live around Bristol Zoo fiercely opposed the redevelopment plans. The Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society (CHIS) were joined by a wider Bristol campaign group called Save Bristol Zoo, and both stated that they would try to challenge the permission given by councillors last year.

Any application for a judicial review has to wait for planning permission to be formally published by Bristol City Council - and now that has happened, the zoo are understood to expect a court challenge to the council.

Back in May last year, just after councillors awarded planning permission in principle, a CHIS spokesperson said they and Save Bristol Zoo Gardens (SBZ) would ‘be doing all in their power to ensure this development does not happen’.

Both groups wrote to the then Secretary of State Michael Gove urging him to ‘call-in’ the application - but he declined to.

“CHIS together with SBZ will look to apply for a Judicial Review,” the CHIS spokesperson said last May. “We think there are reasonable grounds for this. The time limit for lodging a JR application is six weeks after the formal granting of permission,” he added.

Bristol Live understands Bristol Zoo’s bosses believe any challenge will be rejected by the courts, and they will be able to confirm the sale of the site to developers by the end of this year.

“It is a big milestone because that’s been quite a long journey to get to this point,” said the chief executive of Bristol Zoological Society, Justin Morris.

“Critically, selling the BZG site is what’s going to help to fund the future phases of investment at the Bristol Zoo Project site, so whilst it’s great that the Central African Forest is going to start to be constructed this week, we’ve also got a number of other phases of development that we also want to deliver and selling the Clifton site will enable us to do that,” he explained.