The record
Chessington World of Adventures, the theme park and zoo in Surrey, runs a giraffe-feeding experience in which a small party is driven into the giraffe paddock and feeds the animals from the back of a Land Rover. The vehicle for it was built by Foley Specialist Vehicles, the Land Rover conversion firm best known for its six-wheel Defenders, on a Defender 130 Td5 chassis — the long 130-inch wheelbase giving room for three tiers of bench seating behind the cab.
T69 JSS, a 1999-registered Td5, was rebuilt in the manner of an African safari game viewer: the crew cab cut back to two doors, an open high-sided body with tiered benches and grab rails in place of the rear cab and tray, sand-coloured tubular hoops carrying a dark green canvas canopy over both cab and body, everything painted sand, sand steel wheels on mud-terrain tyres, a chequer-plate side step and a rear step for boarding, and mudflaps all round. Foley's own page records that the vehicle had been with Chessington for four years and was 'still going strong' when photographed. It is a one-off; the year of the conversion is not stated.
