In 2022, the newly formed Archive Team began the huge task of locating and centralising thousands of Chester Zoo's historical records which were stored in various locations around the zoo. Since then we've begun the process of cataloguing these records and preserving them for future generations. The Archive Team is working diligently to add more records to this catalogue, but it's a work in progress that will take years to complete because it's never been done before.
The catalogue hierarchy shows the broad titles of the records that we hold, but these have not been catalogued and may not be readily available. If there are particular records that you're interested in, please contact archives@chesterzoo.org and we'll assist with your enquiry. Cataloguing these large record sets takes time and we'll keep you posted as more records become available.
Chester Zoo's newsletters and annual reports provide a rich source of information documenting nearly 100 years of our history. With this in mind, we've had these digitised and they're available to view directly within this catalogue.
Chester Zoo acknowledges that our collection contains historic materials which may contain, either in their content or catalogue descriptions, terminology which is inappropriate, outdated, offensive or distressing. Such information does not reflect the current views and values of Chester Zoo. We welcome feedback about the language in our catalogues. While we cannot change fixed attributes connected to items in the collection (e.g. published titles, names or contents) we will always consider requests for changes to be made to other aspects of the records in our catalogues.