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Home Sittingbourne News Article
Artist Dean Tweedy and his psychotherapist wife Tracy always wanted to run a zoo.
So the animal-loving couple jumped at the chance to take over Borth Wild Animalarium.
They packed their bags and moved from Milton Regis to Aberystwyth in Wales.
They already had 40 pets including ducks and lizards so the prospect of looking after more than 300 wild animals including lions, monkeys, snakes and a leopard didn’t phase them.
But according to a new fly-on-the-wall BBC TV documentary, their dream soon turned into a nightmare. A lynx escaped and another was accidentally killed.
With court action from the council looming, death threats from the public and spiralling debts the Tweedys faced losing everything.
To make matters worse, they had allowed a BBC crew to record those early days.
The result, shot with incredible access as everything unfolded, is a spellbinding new series telling the real behind-the-scenes story.
Saving Britain’s Worst Zoo starts on BBC One Wales today and will be available on iPlayer.
Dean is no stranger to controversy.
When living in Milton he made headlines with his ‘moody mermaid’ mural on Sheerness seafront featuring the American Second World War bomb ship Richard Montgomery, which still lies packed with explosives on the seabed just off the coast of Sheppey.
He was a familiar face in Sittingbourne as his company Marvellous Murals ran the town’s annual Chalk It Up art festival.
But in April 2017, after 16 years of creating more than 200 murals across Swale, Dean, now 50, splashed out £625,000 and moved his wife and seven children to Wales to take a crash course in becoming zoo-keepers.
He said at the time: “It’s going really well but it’s early days.
"Trying not to get eaten is a lot of it.We need to get to know each animal quickly and we’ve already had an injury.
My daughter Sarah backed into a Shetland pony and was bitten on the bottom.”
He soon added a splash of colour with a lick of paint and renamed it Borth Wild Animal Kingdom.
The final mural he painted in Sittingbourne was an April Fool’s joke on the floor of The Forum shopping centre.
He also decorated the Sheppey Leisure Centre, alleys off Sittingbourne High Street and St Edward’s Primary School, Sheerness.
For more quirky and unusual stories, click here
