From at least 1210 until 1835, the Tower of London held something stranger than prisoners: a working zoo. Lions, a polar bear that fished the Thames on a chain, and an elephant nobody in England knew how to feed all lived inside its walls, centuries before the Crown Jewels ever arrived.
That's the secret history most Tower guides skip on the way to the jewel house and the ravens: for roughly six hundred years, this fortress was also a menagerie. Every prisoner marched through the gate, and every sightseer who followed after them, walked past caged, roaring animals first.
A gate built to roar at you
Royal records show lion-keepers being paid as early as 1210, and the collection is usually credited to Henry III, who received three "leopards" — almost certainly lions — as a gift from the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in 1235. In 1277, Edward I built a new barbican at the Tower's main entrance specifically to house the animals, and named it the Lion Tower. Anyone entering or leaving — a visiting lord, a delivery cart, a prisoner under guard — walked straight past the cages first.
Conditions were grim even by the standards of the day. Archaeologists who later excavated the Lion Tower's foundations found enclosures only about two by three metres, with animals kept chained and often muzzled.
A polar bear that fished the Thames on a leash
In 1252, Norway's King Haakon IV sent Henry III a live polar bear. Rather than keep it caged all day, its keepers let it swim in the River Thames on the end of a long chain, fishing for its own salmon while Londoners gathered on the bank to watch. It's one of the odder images in the Tower's whole history: a king's gift, tethered, catching dinner in the middle of the city.
An elephant nobody knew how to feed
Three years later, in 1255, France's Louis IX passed along a gift he'd picked up during the Seventh Crusade: an African elephant, the first most people in England had ever seen. Henry III had a special elephant house built for it at the Lion Tower. The trouble was that nobody in the country had ever kept one before, so its keepers guessed at its diet and fed it meat and beer. The elephant died within about two years, in February 1257.
Walk the causeway up to the Middle Tower before you reach the ticket gate — you're crossing almost exactly where the Lion Tower's cages stood for over five hundred years. With Urban Tales running, the menagerie's story plays right as you reach that stretch, before you've even gone inside.
The mistake that finally closed it
By the 1820s the menagerie was still open to the public, run by a keeper named Alfred Cops, who in 1826 nearly lost an arm when a snake he was feeding coiled around it. In 1830, an assistant keeper accidentally let a lion and a tiger share one cage; the fight that followed left the lion dead. Then, in 1835, a monkey bit a chunk out of a guardsman's leg — and that was the incident the authorities decided they wouldn't risk again. The public was let in for the last time on 28 August 1835. Most of the remaining animals went on to help found the new zoological gardens in Regent's Park, now London Zoo; the rest were sold off to an American showman. The Lion Tower itself was torn down.
Even the Tower's other famous animal story is younger than it sounds. Guides tell visitors the resident ravens have guarded the Tower since medieval times, and that the kingdom falls if they ever leave. The Tower's own official historian has traced written mentions of the ravens back no further than the late 1800s — a Victorian flourish added centuries after the real zoo next door had already shut its gates for good.
So the next time someone points out the ravens hopping around the Tower Green, it's worth remembering they're the newer legend. The real six-century animal story is the one standing where the ticket queue does now — and it's the kind of thing this Wander Log exists to dig up before a guide rushes you past it.
The Tower of London and the oldest corner of the City
- 1Tower of LondonThis storyGuarded by lions, a polar bear and an elephant for 600 years before it was just a fortress
- 2Tower BridgeA bus driver jumped a rising drawbridge gap with 20 passengers aboard in 1952
- 3St Katharine DocksThomas Telford's only London project, built in 1828 over a demolished medieval hospital
- 4All Hallows-by-the-TowerClaims the oldest-church title in the City of London; gutted in the Blitz and rebuilt
- 5The MonumentChristopher Wren's column to the Great Fire of 1666 — 311 steps for the view
Open this walk in Urban Tales
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