About a Boy | Penguin Pool, London Zoo — a heart-to-heart with no penguins

Will and Marcus talk properly for the first time beside the penguin pool at London Zoo, in Regent's Park, a short walk north of the lake where the duck died. It is the film's quietest scene: a man with no responsibilities and a boy with too many, side by side at a railing, neither of them looking at the other.

The pool they lean on is one of the most famous small buildings in Britain. Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton group finished it in 1934 — an elliptical white bowl with two cantilevered concrete ramps crossing over the water in a flat spiral, thin enough that they still look impossible. It is Grade I listed. The penguins left in 2004: a 1986–88 refit replaced the original cork and rubber surface with concrete, the birds developed bumblefoot from the hard floor, and in 2011 they moved to Penguin Beach, where the ground is sand.

So the pool is still there, immaculate and empty. Visitors reach the railing, look down at clean white curves and no birds at all, and ask each other what happened. Stand where the scene stands and you get a set piece the film could not have planned: a beautiful thing built for someone else's benefit, kept spotless, and no longer of any use to them.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.