There are no elephants in Worthing Zoo. No lions. No monkeys. Not even a gerbil. In fact, there isn't really a zoo at all.

Yet one is clearly marked slap-bang in the middle of the town in the current edition of the AA West Sussex Street By Street map book.

As residents of the seaside resort know, of the many attractions the town boasts, a zoo is not one of them.

So Brian Hutton, who has lived in Worthing for 25 years, could not believe his eyes when he saw the attraction in the book.

Sure that he would have noticed cages and enclosures full of exotic animals in the centre of the town, he went down to Montague Street to check.

Instead of an assortment of beasts, Mr Hutton, 69, found a small jewellery and gift shop called Zoo.

He wasn't the first person to wonder whether a new tourist attraction had sprung up overnight.

Angela Sawicki, a sales assistant at the shop, said: "We've had people phone up and ask what type of animals we have.

"We thought it was a freak incident and someone had got the wrong end of the stick because of the shop name. We had no idea we were marked as a zoo in the map book."

The book, billed as "Britain's clearest street mapping", also lists the zoo in its index of featured places.

Mr Hutton, of Shelley Road, said: "I don't know how on earth the AA could have got a shop called Zoo confused with an actual zoo especially by marking one right in the centre of a shopping street.

"It's a good book really but I was surprised they had made such an error."

Of the four Zoo shops nationwide, only the Worthing branch has caused confusion for cartographers at the AA.

Fiona Hallsworth, manager of Zoo's Winchester branch, said: "People do comment on what a strange name our shop has but we've never had anyone turning up expecting a real zoo."

An AA spokeswoman said: "We had 400 million pieces of information to go through before the launch of this series of books last May.

"In this particular case there is a shop called Zoo and you can see how this sort of thing happened. In the unlikely event of a shop being called Zoo. It shows the limitations of our database.

"It got through the loop but it will be corrected."

The book will be reprinted within 12 months.