The animals march in two by two

Recreating the tropical environments of six south-east Asian islands in the north west of England is no mean feat, discovers Jason Hesse at Chester Zoo’s latest project.

“Never work with children or animals” is a trope first coined by the comedian WC Fields on the difficulty of their unpredictability. For Chester Zoo, however, both are essential components to the organisation’s success.

Founded in 1931, Chester Zoo has become the most-visited wildlife attraction in Britain, with more than 1.4 million visitors last year. This summer, the zoo completed a £40m, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(60),000m2 project that has recreated the tropical environments of six south-east Asian islands, complete with wildlife. From the very beginning, this was always going to be a large-scale legacy project.

“It’s been the hardest project I’ve ever worked on,” says Chester Zoo development director Simon Mann. “The sheer logistics of the project made it incredibly challenging.” ‘

Islands’, as the project is called, is based on real islands – Panay, Papua, Bali, Sumba, Sumatra and Sulawesi – and includes the largest indoor zoo exhibit in the UK, an indoor monsoon forest. There are around 650 animals and 50,000 plants on the islands.

Chester Zoo is not afraid of thinking big. The registered charity initially had planned to develop a £380m ‘super zoo’ in 2008, with government funding, but the scrapping of regional development agencies by the coalition government put an end to the concept.

Yet Chester Zoo had already obtained planning permission by the time the ‘super zoo’ project was shelved, so the zoo’s trustees agreed to go ahead with undertaking a smaller transformational development project.

The concept for Islands was discussed in late 2010, to create a ‘wow factor’ exhibit with a storyline that would showcase the work that Chester Zoo does out in the field.

“Having previously obtained the planning consent gave us the confidence to do something on a grand scale,” explains Mann. “Based on the IUCN Red List, an international list of endangered and critically-endangered species, we wanted to build something that could have a lasting impact. A hotspot area for the Red List is south-east Asia, which led us to create Islands.”

In 2011, Turner & Townsend were reengaged by the zoo – the consultants had already been hired for the ‘super zoo’ – to run the project to its completion.

“The idea was to model south-east Asia, with native flora and fauna for each island. The design and architecture also had to match each location as accurately to real life as possible,” explains Stephen Watson, the lead project manager for Turner & Townsend (pictured).

“Chester Zoo also made it clear from the get-go that they wanted to raise the bar for the animals. No new enclosure built for Islands could be smaller than the existing enclosure the animal was in.”

The project’s budget was £30m, with a target completion date of May 2015. The zoo’s trustees gave their green light.

Stakeholders
Key to any project’s success is getting the stakeholders’ buy-in. For Chester Zoo, this was no different. From local business groups and environmental action groups to associations, the zoo reached out to as many stakeholders as possible to ensure the project would be fully backed.

“The stakeholder engagement was second to none,” says Watson. “The zoo took a lot of trouble to ensure everyone was fully engaged and felt that they were a part of the new development. It was a very painstaking, Chester-wide consultation process.”

The stakeholder management plan was, to say the least, complex. The stakeholder spider map shows around 40 different stakeholder groups, and the plan is broken down into those that needed a monthly update, a six-monthly update, with face-to-face meetings or by newsletter.

“I have given dozens of public talks with all sorts of groups, as well as a series of events all around Chester,” explains Mann. “If there were any concerns, we looked at how we could influence the design; if there were things we could tweak, we did.

“We have to live with our neighbours. We’ve been here for 80 years and hopefully will be for another 80. We need to maintain our good relationship with the community.”

Work packages
The architect hired to design Islands was Dan Pearlman, a German firm that specialises in zoo projects. Its brief was to take visitors on a highly-themed, atmospheric and immersive journey. This would include educational exhibits, play areas, restaurants and village-style food stands, as well as the design of the islands and the monsoon forest.

The indoor monsoon forest is a 3,500m2, 50m high signature building made of steel and an ETFE ‘pillow’ domed ceiling, similar to the Eden Project buildings, which features its own tropical weather system and temperatures reaching 26°C.

“This required complex, high-knowledge contracting,” explains Watson. “There were specific requirements for each species, such as the height of the fence and the type of environment they like to live in. The project couldn’t just be designed and built as we went along; it had to be a fully-designed project right from the start.”

Building the new exhibit inside of a fully functional zoo made it an even more difficult project, Watson adds, as there was very little space, which created a logistical challenge: “The logistics piece was enormous. There was work being undertaken on every single square millimetre of the site and we had to minimise any disruption to the existing zoo itself.”

This made selecting the right contractors essential. “We needed to work with professionals we could depend on, but also specialists who were flexible and light on their feet. We could not just go to one contractor for the whole thing,” Watson explains. Using an NEC3 form of contract, Turner & Townsend split the project into different work packages.

First, the civil engineering and infrastructure – this included the main civil engineering work, the shell and core of the monsoon forest house and the slabs for all of the other buildings. This was contracted to Laing O’Rourke.

Second, the design of all of the superstructure elements, which was undertaken by a local firm, Read Construction. Third, the fit-out of the monsoon forest. Fourth and finally, the theming and interpretation – that is, all the details that tell the story of the animals and islands. “This was a tricky exercise. The zoo wanted the finished article from day one of the opening. This meant mature plants – and a lot of them,” says Watson. Some 42,000 plants were brought in by the truckload, mainly from the Netherlands and Germany, including 10m high trees. “We just couldn’t go small scale and wait for them to grow.”

Working in conjunction with the zoo and the contractors, Watson decided to adopt the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Plan of Work model for the construction process, following the model’s costing at various stages, getting sign off from the trustees at each milestone and holding the contractors accountable.

This was a particular challenge when collaborating with the German architect, Dan Pearlman, Watson explains. “The German design regimen is different to RIBA in terms of documentation. I had to work closely with the project manager at Dan Pearlman to align the German work stages with the RIBA work stages, so that the various processes were synchronised.”

Two-by-two
The majority of the 650 different species of animals used in Islands were already being kept at Chester Zoo – and ‘just’ needed to be re-housed. Islands brings together a range of animals, including anoa, banteng, babirusa, Bali starling, cassowary, Indonesian rhinoceros hornbill, Indonesian wrinkled hornbill, lorikeet, Sumatran orangutan, saltwater crocodile, Sulawesi macaque, Sumatran tiger and Visayan warty pig.

However, animals being animals – and perhaps this is where WC Fields had a point – the logistics of moving 100 different types of species required a great deal of planning.

“It was much more complex than any of us anticipated,” says Mann. “Animals need varying periods of acclimatisation. Birds are more relaxed, but some animals are much more skittish and require more time. You can’t just drop tigers and orangutans in a new enclosure and have 10,000 visitors come by – these are sensitive animals that need time to settle into their new premises.”

Cost control 
Although the initial plan for Islands came in at £30m, the project cost £40m in total and opened three months later than planned, but Watson says this was expected. Simply because Islands was a one-off type of project – and therefore difficult to benchmark against others – it was difficult to pin down the budget. “There is no doubt that there was scope creep in terms of what the zoo was expecting and what was delivered. It was hard to keep the lid on costs,” Watson explains. However, he maintains that developing over six hectares at £40m is “a very good deal”.

The project was entirely self-funded by Chester Zoo. Due to preparations for the initial ‘super zoo’ concept, the zoo already had a significant amount of savings in the bank.

“We’re a charitable organisation so holding onto money does not make sense – we need to further our mission. The appetite from the trustees was there,” explains Mann.

He says the business case for Islands was conservative, showing an uplift of 10 per cent in visitor numbers and keeping spend-per-head inside of the zoo at the same level.

“We absolutely were conservative from the very start. But, you have to remember, the problem with zoo projects is that they are bespoke,” Mann adds.

The zoo’s trustees were kept advised of any cost control issues as they cropped up. “It was fully documented, and any uplift in cost had to go back to the trustees,” Watson explains. “We developed a very robust chain of control process, and any time there were any changes, we’d go to the project steering group.” In some cases, the trustees would reject proposed changes, and in others, they would ask for more detail.

“It was a very robust change control process, which was one of the positives. We really went to town for governance and change control,” Watson adds. “It’s a model project for control.”

The project even went so far as to implement a currency hedging strategy for the plants and animals that would need to be imported. “We were working with a number of European businesses, so the zoo bought euros in advance so that they knew what they would be paying,” says Watson. “We were fortunate that the project was tended in 2013. The timing was spot-on for getting the best value. Particularly in the north of the UK, it was a depressed market in 2013. If we were to tender the project today, big construction companies might not be interested as there is so much more work around.” Is there further appetite for more development projects at the zoo?

“Our focus is on the core zoo now,” says Mann, “but we are also enabling works for the next project. It won’t be at the £40m mark, but maybe up to £20m, driven out of the master development plan.

“But we’re still not finished with Islands. It was designed as a project that will improve with time. In three or four years, the landscape will have matured and it will be absolutely stunning. We’re not just going to leave it alone now, we will keep tinkering until our visitors feel like they’ve been truly taken out of Chester and into south-east Asia for a few hours.”