A design technology teacher at my secondary school was once tasked with delivering a sex education class. The lesson was coldly pragmatic — sexual organs were discussed in the same tone with which he would have talked about plywood or fibreboard. Intercourse was a carefully calibrated process, rather like earthing a three-pin plug. Then, as the bell rang, the teacher spoke to the boys in their own language: “Believe me, lads, sex is even better than Nemesis at Alton Towers.”
Within this comparison was an important truth. For anyone like me coming of age in the Midlands during the Nineties, riding this rollercoaster was a transformative experience and a rite of passage. It marked a threshold: your voice deepened; you grew hairier; you felt crosswinds of shame and desire gusting in your adolescent soul. You grew tall enough to join the queue and — just maybe — brave enough to buckle up.
Last month Alton Towers announced that Nemesis is to close on November 6. It triggered an outpouring of grief on social media, from parents who had hoped that their children would ride it alongside them one day and couples whose first dates were in its carriages. It was clarified that Nemesis would be closing only temporarily for a revamp and reopening in 2024, but by then the intense public affection for what is regarded as Britain’s greatest rollercoaster had become apparent.
“There are people who have an extremely personal attachment,” says its creator, John Wardley, who ranks the rollercoaster as his proudest career achievement and still receives fan mail about it. “Some people felt that if Nemesis closed, a bit of their lives would go too.”
Wardley explains that Nemesis “tore up the rule book” when it opened in March 1994. It was Europe’s first inverted rollercoaster, meaning that those who ride it are suspended below the track with their feet dangling. And where most of its rivals were austere heaps of rail and scaffold, Nemesis came with a backstory like that of a Hollywood blockbuster: an alien monster had crash-landed in rural Staffordshire at some nonspecific point in history, and had been sleeping soundly beneath the log flume and picnic spots until maintenance staff disturbed its slumber and the beast metamorphosed into a 716m-long rollercoaster.
Nemesis was a ride and a landscape; even its loading station was done up like an alien torso (while faintly resembling spare ribs). Around it flowed blood-red rivers — Ribena, according to one online rumour. Operatically silly and sublime, it became an icon of the time. As Oasis vied with Blur in the Battle of Britpop, so Nemesis fought in the Coaster Wars against the likes of Big One, its contemporary at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
Nearly 30 years after it was opened, Nemesis is still regarded as a masterpiece of engineering — thanks, in part, to Staffordshire county council. Wardley recalls how the local authority prohibited the rollercoaster from rising above tree level, making it necessary to burrow underground so that the ride could duck through tunnels and trenches; its knot of inversions, corkscrews and dives following each other like artfully strung together plot devices that still keep riders guessing today.
“At no point on Nemesis can you see what’s coming,” says Andy Hine, chairman of the Roller Coaster Club of Great Britain. “You’re letting that machine control your destiny.”
Nemesis has long been a part of my life. I first rode it on a school trip at the turn of the millennium — a few frightened classmates pretended to need the loo as we neared the front of the queue, but those of us who braved it were kings of the classroom a day later. Later Nemesis would be a triumphant coda to my GCSEs; then one university reading week was spent lapping up its empty midweek queues.
A decade later I went to Alton Towers with the woman who is now my wife. Time had passed and that old theme park euphoria had diminished — we were no longer so wide-eyed; our knuckles not quite as white. But riding Nemesis was as magnificent as ever — like a dervish, there was an ecstasy in its wild dance.
I’m sad that the dance must draw to a close for now. Fortunately Wardley explains that any changes to the ride will be only “additional touches”; Nemesis is being rebuilt rather than redesigned, and the philosophy will remain the same.
“I want people to feel they have achieved something by riding Nemesis,” he says. “There aren’t many things in everyday life that test what you dare and dare not do.”
“No one has made anything like it before or since,” says Hine. “The ride only lasts a minute and a half, but the memory of it lasts for ever.”
Nemesis closes at the end of the season. A ballot will be held for the last rides (£42;
Alton Towers)
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