For almost 180 years, its collection of natural wonders has been delighting visitors.
Now London Zoo is making the best of its pictorial archives available online for the first time, at www.zsl.org/printstore.
Here's our selection of the most enchanting images — and the stories behind them.
 This baby chimpanzee was pictured in 1928 — but the first primate at the zoo, Tommy the great ape, had taken up residence almost a century before.
He didn't draw the crowds because the zoo wasn't open to the public in those early days. When he died in 1837 he was replaced by an orangutan called Jenny.  One of the keepers offers his flipper to a sea lion in 1921.
The "seal pond" had been a feature of the zoo since the Victorian era. Fish were procured daily from Billingsgate Market and feeding time was one of the day's highlights. The sea lions have now moved out to Whipsnade.  A keeper examines a hippopotamus in 1923. The zoo has had a long and fruitful history with the species, dating back to a creature called Obaysch.
When he arrived by steamer from the White Nile in 1850, he was the first hippo to have been seen in Europe since Roman times and 10,000 people came each day to stare.  A tiger cub comes face-to-face with a young Himalayan black bear in this touching portrait from spring 1914.
The approaching Great War was soon to provide the zoo with a rather special visitor. On being posted to France, a Canadian soldier left a young female black bear cub, called Winnie after his home city of Winnipeg, in the care of the zoo. She became the favourite exhibit of Christopher Robin, son of author A. A. Milne, and her name inspired his most famous creation — Winnie The Pooh.  Two keepers give a pedicure to a mother elephant as her calf watches close by in 1923.
The zoo owed much of its popular success to the fact that, 40 years earlier, it was home to the most famous elephant in history.
The docile "Jumbo" reached some 11ft high and young children rode on his back. When the zoo tried to sell him, some 100,000 British schoolchildren petitioned Queen Victoria to block the decision — to no avail. In 1882 Jumbo was moved to his new home in America, where he was hit by a locomotive and killed three years later.  This photograph taken outside the Zoological Society offices in 1914 shows one of the zoo's earliest forays into marketing.
Four zebras pull a cart advertising a brand of tea. Paying passengers were able to sit alongside the driver. The advertising budget for that year was said to be £730. It now stands at £300,000. Records do not relate how happy the zebras were at being put in harness, nor how efficient they were as beasts of burden.  "The rattle-snakes are very rare and fine," reported an 1850 guide to London Zoo.
This keeper, pictured 20 years later, is not draped in a poisonous snake, of course, but a constricting python. During the Blitz in World War II all the zoo's poisonous snakes were put down, in case their enclosure was bombed and they escaped into North London.  The famous spiral penguin pool was still 20 years away when this keeper was pictured with an emperor penguin in 1914.
Such creatures were of particular interest to the public then because of recent expeditions to the South Pole by Scott and Shackleton, both of whom ate the creatures in quantity.Labels: London Zoo Rare Picures
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