After a period of non-use, during which Lubetkin's daughter called for the structure to be "blown to smithereens", the pool was converted into a water feature.

The appointment of Peter Chalmers Mitchell as Secretary of the Society in 1903 saw a change of view, towards creating more natural habitats; Mitchell himself, in conjunction with John James Joass, designed the Mappin Terraces, a series of artificial mountains designed to provided realistic environments for bears and other animals.

It was suggested that the replacement of the original rubber and cork floor covering with concrete and a quartz aggregate during the reconstruction had caused micro-abrasions on the penguins' feet, leading to infection.

An attempt to house Chinese alligators in the pool was unsuccessful, and drew criticism from The Twentieth Century Society which claimed that “the zoo does not comprehend the aesthetic qualities of its best building”.

[21] The Victoria and Albert Museum, in its 2016 exhibition, Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design, described the pool as proposing "a new direction for British architecture, [and] also one of the first to demonstrate the expressive and structural potential of reinforced concrete.

[22] Lubetkin himself also expressed doubts; speaking some forty years after the pool’s construction, he suggested, “the philosophical aims and orderly character of those designs are diametrically opposed to the intellectual climate in which we live…these buildings cry out for a world which has never come into being.”[23]