London Zoo sits within Regent’s Park and plays a fittingly absurd role in the imaginative geography of Douglas Adams’ London. It’s one of the places where Earth’s strangeness becomes most obvious — a living museum of improbable creatures, each perfectly evolved to survive on one small blue-green planet that mostly goes unnoticed by the rest of the galaxy.
SEARCH 51.5348056, -0.1548066 London Zoo, Outer Circle, Primrose Hill, Chalk Farm, London Borough of Camden, London, Greater London, England, NW1 4RY, United Kingdom
Adams, a lifelong animal lover and environmentalist, supported conservation causes later in life, co-authoring Last Chance to See — a travelogue about endangered species that feels like a nonfiction companion to *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*. London Zoo, with its mix of wonder and melancholy, could easily have inspired that sensibility.
Today, it remains a place where visitors can contemplate the improbable diversity of life — and perhaps wonder, like Arthur Dent, “What are we doing here?”
# Douglas Adams and Penguins The penguin appears throughout Douglas Adams’ creative universe — partly as a running joke, partly as a personal totem of absurdity and wonder.
The “penguin” moment in Hitchhiker’s** In *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*, there’s a surreal scene in which Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent are hit by an “infinite improbability” and Arthur briefly transforms into a penguin. This moment perfectly captures Adams’ brand of humor — cosmic-scale randomness rendered as something endearingly silly. Adams’ relationship with *Penguin Books* was also central to his career. *The Hitchhiker’s Guide* paperbacks were published under the Penguin imprint *Pan Books*, making the penguin logo a quiet part of Hitchhiker lore.
