Sea Life London Aquarium

From the London Aquarium to Sea Life

The aquarium opened in March 1997 as the London Aquarium, a private venture in the lower floors of County Hall. Merlin Entertainments bought it from County Hall Entertainment in May 2008, closed it that November for a redevelopment reported at about £5 million, and reopened it on 17 April 2009 under the Sea Life name it still carries. That rebuild produced the two displays the place is now organised around, along with a seahorse display, a Thames display and an Atlantic coastline display.

The operator's own account of its history gives 2005 as the year of acquisition. That is wrong, and it is worth saying so, because an official page is the first place anyone checks: the purchase was reported in the trade press in May 2008, and the relaunch was opened by the Mayor of London in April 2009.

County Hall

The building is more distinguished than its present tenant list suggests. It was designed by Ralph Knott and built between 1911 and 1933 as the seat of London's county government, and it is listed Grade II* — it has carried a listing since October 1951. It housed the Greater London Council until that body was abolished on 1 April 1986. The north and south wings were converted to flats from 1994.

The rest of it is now a mixture. Two hotels occupy parts of the building. The London Dungeon moved into the vaults beneath it in March 2013, from its old premises in Tooley Street, and a Shrek-themed attraction opened later. An amusement arcade that had been there twenty-five years closed in August 2021. The London Eye stands beside the building on the riverside, which is why the two are so often visited together.

The displays

Fourteen themed zones run across two floors of the building's lower levels — not a basement, a description the operator specifically disputes. Two displays dominate, both dating from the 2009 rebuild. The larger is the Pacific display, crossed overhead by a glass walkway called the Shark Walk, which puts visitors above the water rather than beside it. The second is the Ocean Tunnel, an acrylic walk-through tube holding green sea turtles and cownose rays, with a whale skeleton mounted above it. The remaining zones work through habitats: Atlantic coasts, coral, seahorses, rainforest, open ocean, a shipwreck, a polar zone, and a jellyfish gallery added in 2017.

Published species counts are not reliable. The operator's own pages give two different figures, and older accounts give a third.

Handling, and what has changed

One zone, Rockpool Explorer, is the hands-on one, and what may be handled there is narrower than is generally reported: egg cases of skate and shark, under supervision, rather than live animals. Ray Lagoon, often described as a pool where rays can be stroked, is a viewing display with a window beneath it.

The direction of travel is away from handling altogether. The Standards of Modern Zoo Practice for Great Britain, published in May 2025, stop aquariums letting visitors touch fish and cephalopods, with a two-year period to adapt. Rays are fish, so any account of stroking them belongs to the past.

The penguins

A colony of gentoo penguins has been kept in the polar zone since 2011, on the operator's own account. They are the subject of the only sustained public controversy attached to the place, and they are leaving.

A campaign run by Freedom for Animals with Born Free sought their relocation, with a protest outside the building in October 2025 and a petition. In November 2025 more than seventy MPs and peers wrote to the Environment Secretary asking for an independent welfare assessment, an evaluation against the Animal Welfare Act 2006 and the zoo standards, and publication of the findings. The campaigners' case rested on the depth of the pool set against the depths at which wild gentoos dive. The operator replied that release into the wild was not possible, that its zoo licence had been renewed in April 2025 following inspection, and that the enclosure is climate-controlled and at ground level.

In October 2026 the operator announced that the habitat will close and the colony will move to the National Sea Life Centre in Birmingham, with plans to go to the local authority shortly, works expected to start in 2027 and the move anticipated during 2028. It also confirmed that it will stop breeding gentoo penguins at both sites. What the London space will hold afterwards has not been settled, beyond a statement that it will support conservation work.

Getting there

Westminster and Waterloo are much the same distance on foot, five to ten minutes from either — from Westminster across Westminster Bridge, from Waterloo down past the London Eye. Embankment is a little further. County Hall faces Parliament across the river rather than across a street, which is the source of a good deal of confused direction-giving.