New Visitor Centre for our Wildlife Park

Work has just started on the first phase of redevelopment of the visitor centre at Durrell Wildlife Park in Jersey. The aim is to create a welcoming entrance area with facilities that will in themselves attract people to Durrell, and then encourage them to go into the park.

The new building will be light, airy and much larger than the current centre. The car park will be reorganised, with a new entrance down the drive of Les Noyers, the home of the International Training Centre, which is next door to the wildlife park.

One of the most attractive features will be our new Café Firefly with an outdoor terrace overlooking the grounds; the café will be accessible without having to go into the park.

Café Firefly is not intended to replace the Café Dodo within the grounds, but will be offering slightly different fare, including light lunches and home-made sandwiches. Ingredients will be sourced from Durrell’s own organic farm and from other local producers as much as possible; where supplies have to be brought in from overseas, the associated carbon emission will be offset. In this way, we hope to considerably reduce our footprint on the earth.

We are also trialling a “rammed-earth” construction technique; this involves compressing a mixture of soil and other materials within a frame. Once complete, the frame is removed. This is an ancient building method that has a low environmental impact and the additional advantage of reducing temperature variation in the building, thus lowering heating and air conditioning costs.

A new shop area will include plants grown by our Landscape team, sales of which have been very successful in a trial scheme. We are looking at ways of incorporating animals into the centre, perhaps with an aquarium or an enclosure that is overlooked by the café terrace.

A fiscal stimulus grant from the States of Jersey is helping to finance construction of the new centre; to meet the immediate co-funding required by the States to access the grant, a bank facility has been taken out, though our intention is to raise the matching funding through a capital appeal to be launched next year.

With the current difficult economic climate it is vital that we maximise income from the site, and Jamie Copsey, Head of Training, says: “We’re confident that the new visitor centre will make a significant contribution to our long-term sustainability.”

News from Durrell - Autumn 2010

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