On Good Friday, we paid a visit to Knowsley Safari Park, on the eastern edge of Liverpool. This was actually our sixth visit, going back to 2018 when our nine-year-old was only two, but apparently I’ve never blogged about it before. We received gift tickets as Christmas presents from my parents.
Knowsley Safari Park is the only drive-through safari park in the North of England, and one of only six in the UK. You may know it from the Channel 4 series, the Secret Life of the Safari Park, which aired last year and is available to stream on 4oD, or whatever it’s changed its name to this week. For us in Sowerby Bridge, it’s only an hour’s drive in good traffic, despite being in Merseyside and on the other side of Manchester. However, its distance means that, in bad traffic, it can take much longer, and on a previous trip in 2019 I remember having to take a huge diversion via Preston and Burnley to get home, due to a closure on the M60.
The Safari Drive
Knowlsey Safari Park is split into two parts. As mentioned, there’s a drive-through safari, where you stay in your own car and drive (slowly) past lots of different animals. The drive is split into several zones to split the animals up, nominally by where you would find them in the wild. Expect to see lots of different species of deer and antelope, but there are also several rhinos and camels. There are also some wandering ostriches which like to peck at the rubber seals around your car windows.
Speaking of animals which like to damage cars, there’s a separate section for the baboons. The baboon colony at Knowsley is quite large, both in terms of space and population. There are warning signs as you drive in that your car will be damaged, and so there’s a ‘baboon bypass’ you can take if you’d rather not have a cheeky baboon steal your windscreen wipers. We drove through on our first visit in 2018, and ended up without some rubber windscreen seals that we weren’t able to replace. On subsequent visits, we’ve parked up next to the baboon enclosure for the schadenfreude of watching other peoples’ cars getting damaged.
The other animals that have their own section are the African Lions, mainly because they would probably hunt the other animals on the safari drive, given the chance. As well as cattle grids between each zone, you drive over electric webbing to enter the lion zone.
This time we also saw plenty of animals which weren’t part of Knowsley’s collection, that just happened too be there. There were plenty of pheasants, as well as partridges, oyster catchers and lapwings.
Foot Safari
The other part of Knowsley Safari Park is the ‘foot safari’, which is where you can park up your car and walk around, like in a traditional zoo. This is where you’ll see the Amur Tigers, tapir, giraffes, bears, sealions, bush dogs, meerkats and birds of prey. The foot safari used to be in a horseshoe shape, but since our last visit they’ve added a wildlife walk to make it a complete circuit. This also gives access to a new area with sheep and goats. We actually did this bit first, having arrived at opening time, and it was nice and peaceful.
Shows and displays
There are a couple of shows that are worth watching whilst you’re at the foot safari. The first is the sealion show, where they show the zoo’s sealions performing tricks. And the second is a birds of prey show, where they will fly several of their birds. The sealion show is indoors, and the birds of prey show is either indoors or outdoors depending on the weather. Though the weather on Good Friday wasn’t great (definitely worse than recently and Good Friday last year), the birds of prey show was outside. There are also various talks about the animals on the foot safari at set times.
The shows are all in the afternoons, as I think the expectation is that you’ll do the safari drive first and then the foot safari. We did it the other way around, as we expected the weather to be worse later on. Compared to other zoos, being able to use your car to drive through has its advantages in bad weather.
For the first time in a while, I’ve had time to upload the rest of my photos to Flickr, so take a look.
Accessibility
Most people will drive to Knowsley Safari Park, and it’s located just off the M57 (which itself isn’t far from the M62). But it is reachable by public transport – the nearest town is Prescot, and there’s a direct bus from the bus station there. You can also get the train to Prescot and walk – it takes about half an hour, apparently. If you want to do the safari drive, but haven’t arrived in a car, then you can take the Baboon Bus. You need to pre-book, and my experience you should book at least a couple of weeks in advance. It goes around the whole safari drive, including the baboon enclosure. It’s fitted with ropes and things for the baboons to climb on, and presumably they have access to a good supply of spare parts.
The foot safari is almost exclusively on one level, and where it isn’t, ramps are provided. There are two Changing Places toilets on site. Assistance dogs are only allowed outside of the animal areas, however; kennels are provided if needed.
Also, I feel it’s worth mentioning that the food at Knowsley Safari is above average, compared to most other zoos, and it’s not too over-priced. Sure, you can have the usual hotdogs and burgers, but I had quite a nice katsu curry when we went.
