Before modern times, in the middle ages, we did not have zoos ( well, except for royal menageries). Neither did we have sports stadia, nor parks, nor museums, nor concert halls, nor art galleries, nor science centres, nor community centres, etc
What we did have was….. cathedrals.
Cathedrals were the great aspirational communal project. Cathedrals offered spaces where ordinary people could go to experience something ‘other’, something transcendent and removed from everyday life, to get a glimpse of heaven. The funding and construction for cathedrals was a huge, joint, sacrificial enterprise perhaps taking generations to complete. People from all levels of society gave away their money with no practical prospect of reward (….except maybe not going to hell)
Now society is splintered. Not everyone believes in God. For some people, sport is tantamount to religion, for others it is the arts, others again science and learning, some of us are utterly absorbed by Nature itself.
But we still build our ‘cathedrals’ ( n.b. ‘museum’ = a temple to the 9 Muse godesses, and so a sort of cathedral) , complete with vaunting architecture, costing masses of public money, where large congretations come together to get their fix of otherness.
Some ‘cathedrals’ work. Others, like the National Rock and Pop Museum in Sheffield, UK fail. The National Football Museum in Preston, UK ( beautifully designed and very well managed by the way in case they are reading) struggles to attact large audiences. But where do you go, if your ‘big thing’ is football or rock music…? Well, to a match or a rock concert with 50,000 other fanatics. Not, I am afraid, to a museum. The temple,s the great visceral shared experience, for these areas of life already exist.
But you cannot go ( ..or would want to go) to war, so the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester is a big success. You cannot go back into the past, so our traditional great heritage museums, the British Museum or the V&A remain popular. You cannot go to heaven and meet God, so actual cathedrals remain incredibly popular as tourist attractions as well as places of worship. You cannot easily visit the rainforest, hence the triumph of the Eden Project.
…. And most of us do not get to go on Safari or otherwise see fantastic wild animals in a wild context, so zoos and aquaria still attract millions of people.
The moral of the story? Well, next time you bid for millions of pounds to Government to completely redesign your zoo, remember, you are not constructing anything as mundane as a tourist attraction or establishing something as trite as a collection of animals for people to gawk at. You are raising a cathedral, you are establishing a monument to life itself.
