A polar bear in the Thames

In 1235 the Holy Roman Emperor gave Henry III three 'leopards', probably lions, and the king started a menagerie at the Tower. A polar bear arrived from the King of Norway in 1252 and was allowed, muzzled and on a stout cord, to swim and catch fish in the Thames. An elephant from the King of France followed in 1255, with a purpose-built house; it died within two years. Edward I gave the animals a permanent home in a bastion at the western entrance, the Lion Tower, so that every visitor arrived to the roar and smell of big cats. The collection grew over the centuries, keepers and visitors were occasionally mauled, and in 1835 the Duke of Wellington, as Constable, had the whole thing shut down and the animals sent to the new zoo in Regent's Park. The Lion Tower was demolished; the wire animals on its site are by the sculptor Kendra Haste.

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The first thing a visitor to the Tower of London encountered, for most of six hundred years, was not a guard but a roar.

It began with a diplomatic gift. In 1235 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who had just married Henry III’s sister, sent the English king three “leopards”. They were almost certainly lions, described as leopards to match the three beasts on Henry’s shield, the ancestors of the three lions on an England football shirt today. Henry, delighted, kept them at the Tower and started collecting.

In 1252 the King of Norway sent a white bear, which we can safely call a polar bear, with a keeper. The Sheriffs of London were ordered to pay for its upkeep, and, presumably to save on fish, the bear was allowed out of the Tower to hunt for itself in the Thames, muzzled and chained, with a collar and a “stout cord” to keep it from escaping. Londoners on the wharf watched a polar bear fishing where the river cruises now dock. Three years later the King of France sent an elephant, the first seen in England, and people flocked “to see the novel sight”. It was given a purpose-built house forty feet by twenty and a dedicated keeper, and it died in about two years. Most of the animals did; cramped, cold and badly fed, they lived short lives, though the lions bred well enough that there were always lions.

The Lion Tower

Edward I, who rebuilt the Tower’s entrance in the 1270s, gave the menagerie a permanent home: a semicircular bastion at the western approach, just outside the Middle Tower, which became known as the Lion Tower. From then on everyone who came to the Tower, ambassadors and prisoners alike, walked past the cages. The noise and the smell were part of the fortress’s message.

It became a show. By 1622 there were eagles, pumas, a tiger and a jackal alongside the lions and leopards. James I had the lions’ den rebuilt so that visitors could watch them prowl a circular yard with a cistern “for the Lyons to drink and wash themselfes in”. In the eighteenth century the menagerie was one of London’s sights, priced at a few pence or, by a much-repeated tradition, a dog or cat to feed to the lions. Exotic animals arrived with the growth of the British empire: a cheetah called Miss Jenny from Bengal in 1764, with her Indian keeper; a Bengal lion cub called George in 1822, orphaned by a big-game hunter and shipped from India with a goat for a foster mother, so tame on arrival that visitors could play with him.

Animals occasionally took revenge. Keepers and visitors who got too close were mauled and sometimes killed.

The end

In 1822 an energetic keeper called Alfred Cops, poached from a rival menagerie in the Strand, revived the collection from eight animals to a guide-listed fifty-eight species and record crowds. His timing was bad. In 1826 the Duke of Wellington became Constable of the Tower and decided that a royal fortress was not a public exhibition. The crowds were a security problem and the animals were in the way. In 1835 the menagerie was closed and most of the animals transferred to the new Zoological Society gardens in Regent’s Park, which is why London Zoo can trace its ancestry to a Norwegian bear. The Lion Tower was pulled down soon after; its foundations survive in the moat by the ticket office.

The wire animals on the grass today, lions, baboons, an elephant and the polar bear, are by the sculptor Kendra Haste, made of galvanised wire so that you can see the daylight through them. They are the right ghosts for the spot.