Exhibition Park welcomed some new residents as 25 bronze lions were unveiled by film star Virginia McKenna.
Virginia starred alongside her husband Bill Travers in Born Free in 1966, which told the true story of Elsa, an orphaned lioness who was rehabilitated by couple George and Joy Adamson and returned to the wild. The centrepiece of the exhibition, Born Free Forever , is a sculpture of Elsa atop a 4 x4, with the exhibition aiming to raise awareness of the plight facing the world's lion population today.
Born Free Forever is a free exhibition and the largest of its kind in the UK and is part of a year of action for lions, with only 20,000 remaining compared to 200,000 a century ago. Their number could decline even further, with the possibility that the big cats could go extinct across much of their wild range in the next 30 years.
