Why does the South West of England lack major or semi-major theme parks?

[rob666]

I did my first and only earnest coaster search through Devon and Cornwall, with my first real access to "anywhere" as I had just passed my test...the late summer of 1979.
Stunning holiday at my cousin's home just over the Taymar into Cornwall.
Excellent holiday...shit coasters.
And they never got any better.
My cousin explained the area was very pretty, so planning was just about impossible for large permanent rides anywhere in the counties, and the bloody tourists were only about for 20% of the year, so major investment in the low population area was extremely unlikely.
Looks like he was spot on.

 

[PhalanaxOperativeA1127]

Also I can recall in the early 1990s childhood holidays in Devon/Cornwall and we visited a few different small/medium parks in the area, if there was the market to grow then they could have, same as Paulton has.

I can't recall what I visited as a child but one may have been Flambards and that seems to be doing OK, but I assume their business is very seasonal. Another place we visited had houses and model village parts that were illuminated at night, no idea what it was called though.

Flambards is not doing OK at all. They've spent a large part of the year closed and have just sold or binned all their major rides. Reopened now but with no replacements. Rumours are the owners want to sell for housing in the next couple of years.

 

[geomxs]

I mean at least you have theme parks in England, trying being in Scotland where we have, well... M&Ds! I would absolutely love Liseberg-esque style park somewhere up here. Used to think Loudon Castle back in the day, would end up being a "Scottish Alton Towers" if it had the proper investment, what dreams they were!

 

[Matt N]

Isn’t the open with some old flats and hope for the best what Southport Pleasureland is doing?

I think that’s the other thing, Cornwall & Devon have some parks that used to be farms or stately homes but there isn’t the history of seaside pleasure beach parks in the region either. Whereas Southend, Great Yarmouth, Morecambe, Southport, Blackpool, Barry Island and other places all had or still have some kind of seaside amusements with a rollercoaster.

The interesting thing is that there is arguably a (sort of) history of this sort of thing in Weston-super-Mare, which is in the West Country. Admittedly perhaps not on quite the same scale as some, but the Grand Pier in Weston (the old one that burned down, not the current one) has had roller coasters in the past and has had a fair amusement park offering for a number of years.

But yes, the region more widely, particularly Devon and Cornwall, does lack that heritage of substantial seaside parks that other parts of the country have. Much of the seaside in the South West, with the exception of Weston-super-Mare and one or two other Somerset seaside resorts, is more of the ilk of “natural beauty seaside” rather than “manmade seaside” in the vein of places like Blackpool, Great Yarmouth, Southend and similar.

Also I can recall in the early 1990s childhood holidays in Devon/Cornwall and we visited a few different small/medium parks in the area, if there was the market to grow then they could have, same as Paulton has.

I can't recall what I visited as a child but one may have been Flambards and that seems to be doing OK, but I assume their business is very seasonal. Another place we visited had houses and model village parts that were illuminated at night, no idea what it was called though.

Wee bit of topic but you can see Scotland could support a decent sized theme park...instead we got saddled with M&D's and whenever argues that certain park and low footfall proves that Scotland couldn't support a theme park...it's only low is because it is so crap when if they gave a damn, you'd have a park that could do well with little to no competition.

These two posts raise an interesting question for me. Could a lack of ambition among the few parks we do have in the South West have something to do with why the region has no major or semi-major parks?

The likes of Oakwood pre-Aspro, and the likes of Folly Farm in the same region today, arguably prove that you can get around the pitfalls of a remote location to some extent to make a prosperous business. If Oakwood had been consistently invested in over the years rather than largely neglected after the mid-2000s, I think it would be much more successful than it is today, and the success of Folly Farm in the same region arguably proves that good, consistent investment can make for a really successful attraction regardless of location. Folly Farm and Oakwood have far less going for them than numerous parts of the West Country, yet Folly Farm is managing to make a decent success of its business with continued investment, and despite what everyone says about Oakwood, it still survives despite having had relatively minimal investment in recent years.

I’d also cite Fantasy Island as a case study. Skegness/Ingoldmells does not have a notable heritage of seaside parks, it’s not a particularly populous area like some of the old Victorian seaside towns are, it has quite poor road and rail connections, it’s not within overly close range of any major population centres (the closest is probably Peterborough, and that’s nearly a 2 hour drive away; other nearby places are all over 2 hours’ drive away). It doesn’t appear that dissimilar to somewhere like Brean (the town), and arguably has a far worse predicament in terms of road and rail connections and local captive population than Brean. Yet Fantasy Island manages to sustain itself as a semi-major theme park. You’ve got two huge Vekomas there that are among the biggest coasters in the country, you’ve got some other substantial rides like a big drop tower, and they also recently installed a trackless dark ride that looks rather impressive for a smaller UK park.

With this in mind, I do wonder whether it’s partly down to a lack of ambition among the parks in the area. Had Brean Theme Park, for example, done a Fantasy Island and had the ambition to build something massive like Millennium or Odyssey, might it have been able to make something more of itself? Had Crealy or Flambard’s done an Oakwood and had the ambition to build something impressive like Megafobia, might they have been able to make something more of themselves?

 

[Leigh]

@Ted makes a good point. They couldn't just open with a fourth-hand Pinfari and a few travelling flats, then hope people will turn up and give them enough cashflow to invest in bigger rides later. They wouldn't last a year.

Amusingly, this is the current business strategy of Flambards - except no fourth hand Pinfari.

 

[Matt.GC]

For my sins, I live in Weston-super-Mare. It's a very different town to Blackpool, Great Yarmouth, Clacton-on-Sea etc in some respects.

It always used to act as the seaside resort for Bristol and Birmingham. The town itself is mostly Victorian built. Whilst other seaside towns were building pleasure beaches, the geography of this area would not have supported it at the time. The main amusement attractions were the Grand Pier, and the Tropicana outdoor waterpark. The beach is mainly a mudflat, extremely dangerous at low tide further out and the tidal range is the second fastest in the entire world.

Most of Weston is flat marshland that wasn't even suitable for farming a couple of hundred years ago, let alone building leisure attractions. The village of Worle actually predates Weston, and has been inhabited for hundreds of years, but the old village itself is on a hill. To get to the coast from Bristol in the winter, you had to take what we now know locally as 'the top road'. The GWR had problems when they built the railway through through the marshes. By the time the land started to drain enough for building, the tourist ship on seaside towns and building pleasure beaches had begun to sail away.

You can see this in the town itself in the type of housing. The ancient buildings on the hills, 1700's buildings further down. Then you have Victorian buildings, early 20th century and up the 1960's the northern side of the railway. On the southern side of the railway, most of the developments were built between the 1970's and 2010's (my house was built in 2001). It gets newer the further you go onto the moors. The newest estates and business parks are still being built now.

But on the ground, there's drainage rhines and manmade ponds and lakes everywhere. These still flood in the winter (controlled) and there is a large pumping station right next to the M5 that pumps water under the motorway onto the moors on the other side. When the M5 itself was built here in the 70's, the tarmac between Clevedon and Taunton used to sink. When an estate was built in the late 90's, they were having problems with subsidence. I rented a new build in 2008, and the garden would waterlog in the in winter but crack up in the summer. There's an estate near me that's being built now, and the construction work has caused surface water around the estate as the water table is still so high.

In short, when other seaside towns were in their heyday, Weston was mostly still flood planes. Now, it's pretty much just a suburb of Bristol, like Clevedon, Nailsea, and Portishead are. For the little land that isn't greenbelt that's left, it'll be used for housing as there's not really many places left to build around the city itself. It has excellent rail and motorway links, and there is enough of a captive audience in this location to support a semi-major attraction with it being in easy reach of Bristol, South Wales, Birmingham, and even London. It also still has a minor tourist industry. But housing is where development has been for the last 60 years (I've been here 22 years and the population has nearly doubled in size in that time) and this is continuing. Not much land left now. One more large bit of old farmland, with the old airport and RAF camp being developed at the moment.

 

[Enter Valhalla]

I reckon with the right investment, Exeter could manage it. If you look at the map, Exeter is pretty well connected from all directions with roads and rail. They have Crealy and perhaps local planning restrictions are what prevent Crealy from becoming big enough to compete with the major players, but there a fair population of people in the surrounding areas which I think could make a large Exeter theme park work, on the caveat that it had the right financial backing and favourable planning restrictions.

 

[QTXAdsy]

Used to think Loudon Castle back in the day, would end up being a "Scottish Alton Towers" if it had the proper investment, what dreams they were!

I did too back in the day as they did have the feeling of Towers back in the 80s. Just a crying shame it didn't work out for them as had they done a better job marketing and with some more money, so much what if moments there.

 

[Leigh]

I reckon with the right investment, Exeter could manage it. If you look at the map, Exeter is pretty well connected from all directions with roads and rail. They have Crealy and perhaps local planning restrictions are what prevent Crealy from becoming big enough to compete with the major players, but there a fair population of people in the surrounding areas which I think could make a large Exeter theme park work, on the caveat that it had the right financial backing and favourable planning restrictions.

Crealy could’ve already expanded if the demand was there for it; in fact they’ve already got a good amount of land and the area isn’t residential or anything of significant interest requiring protection (it’s mostly industrial estates and Westpoint - the latter of which makes far more noise and impact that Crealy ever would).

The rail links are also a bit of a red herring. The Great Western (GWR to London and Bristol/Cardiff + CrossCountry to the north) runs into St David’s so isn’t really anywhere near where a park could go, and the West of England (SWR to Waterloo) has some quite significant capacity constraints due to it being mostly single-track combined with a low service frequency of a maximum of 1 train an hour.

I do think if there’s anywhere in Devon and Cornwall it could work it would be Exeter, but I just think if it were going to happen it would’ve done so already. Bear in mind Crealy already had to sell off Camel Creek (then Cornwall’s Crealy) to try and stay afloat a few years back.

 

[Matt.GC]

Exeter is also too far down from population centres. Good point about land to expand as well. Crealy and Brean both have land to expand on yet have not done so.

 

[Matt N]

I reckon a little bit further north than Exeter would work better. Looking at Maps, somewhere in Somerset like Bridgwater or Taunton would still cater for most of the West Country while also being a bit more ideal for access from other places like Birmingham, London and South Wales.

Bridgwater and Taunton are also very close to the M5 as well, so they would have easy road access too.

 

[Enter Valhalla]

It’s interesting how people are saying that if it could happen, it would have done already. There’s a lot of truth in that and I would therefore say that the only way for somewhere like Crealy to be a big player is if some super wealthy private investor was to purchase the park or set up a new park and turn it into an aggressively expanding Energylandia type park, which would draw people there rather than to the other big parks. In reality, that’s highly unlikely to happen. We can dream though.

 

[Matt N]

It’s interesting how people are saying that if it could happen, it would have done already. There’s a lot of truth in that and I would therefore say that the only way for somewhere like Crealy to be a big player is if some super wealthy private investor was to purchase the park or set up a new park and turn it into an aggressively expanding Energylandia type park, which would draw people there rather than to the other big parks. In reality, that’s highly unlikely to happen. We can dream though.

To tell you the truth, I created this thread to question why a major park hadn’t been built in the West Country earlier, when the country was in a theme park building spree, just as much as why no one is building one here now, if not more.

Realistically, we’re well out of the theme park building spree in the UK. The spree of modern theme park building in Britain started in the late 1970s and probably ended in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The chances of having a new ground-up theme park built in the West Country any time soon are probably slim to none.

Yes, we have Universal and Puy du Fou being proposed, but the UK, and the Western world in general, has not had a plethora of new major theme parks being built for a number of years if not a number of decades. Universal and Puy du Fou are exceptions rather than the norm, and they will fill a gap in the market by being designed to appeal to a large international tourist demographic rather than an overwhelmingly domestic one like our current parks are. Realistically, you are not ever going to see this type of park built in the West Country, or probably anywhere other than the South East for that matter.

The thing that surprises me as much as anything is that nothing was ever built here during the UK’s theme park building spree in the 1980s and early 1990s. It would be understandable that there was nothing around here now if there had been previous attempts that didn’t stick and eventually closed as was the case elsewhere in the country, but there wasn’t even anything attempted down here in the way of a semi-major theme park, to my knowledge. The closest we ever got was Crinkley Bottom in Cricket St Thomas (which I was actually lucky enough to walk around the site of a couple of years back!), and I get the impression that that one wasn’t ever a “semi-major theme park” on the scale of some others in the country and its closure was more tied to the fact it was themed predominantly to a fleeting 90s fad in Mr Blobby than the location. Noel Edmonds’ numerous Blobby theme park attempts elsewhere in the country had even less success than Cricket St Thomas.

Quite a lot of theme parks have closed in this country over the years, and some regions have had quite a diminishing theme park industry in recent years. The North West may only have Blackpool now, but back in the day, it was joined by Frontierland Morecambe and Pleasureland Southport in terms of older parks, and Camelot and Granada Studios in terms of “modern” ones. The East Midlands may only have Fantasy Island now, but back in the day, it was joined by American Adventure and Pleasure Island. The North East may have nothing semi-major now, but it used to have MetroLand.

But the South West never even had that. The South West never even had any semi-major parks built here during the theme park boom of the 80s and 90s. That’s the thing I’m confused by.

 

[Enter Valhalla]

I think that Paultons have shown that, with the right IP (because let’s be honest, loads of people just refer to the park as Peppa Pig World, rather than Paultons), you can get people to travel from far, even if you are all the way down near Romsey like they are.

With that in mind, if a park like Crealy invested into something as big and successful as Paultons did with Peppa, they could attract people from far and wide. In 2011 when Peppa opened, it doubled Paultons’ attendance for the year and people were reported to have visited the park from every UK postcode.

The issue is that it’s a gamble. Paultons have been extremely lucky that Peppa has stayed relevant and actually grown in popularity since 2011, but think what other IPs were popular in 2011 but have become obsolete now. Peppa could have gone this way and thankfully for Paultons it didn’t. But look at all the IPs in BPB’s Nickelodeon Land for example. Most are nowhere near as relevant now as they were at the time of opening.

Paultons took a big gamble, and knowing how much that park likes to be sensible, I’m very surprised they did to be honest. But it worked so good luck to them.

If a park in the West Country was to take a similar gamble and it not pay off, it could be curtains for them.

 

[Leigh]

It’s interesting how people are saying that if it could happen, it would have done already. There’s a lot of truth in that and I would therefore say that the only way for somewhere like Crealy to be a big player is if some super wealthy private investor was to purchase the park or set up a new park and turn it into an aggressively expanding Energylandia type park, which would draw people there rather than to the other big parks. In reality, that’s highly unlikely to happen. We can dream though.

That’s the strategy John Broome attempted with Camel Creek, and look how that turned out. Although admittedly I do think if he invested in some half decent modern ride hardware and not things like 25th hand Bulgarian Pinfaris maybe the attendance would’ve been better.

 

[Matt.GC]

It's an interesting discussion Matt, and something I've always wondered myself as well.

I suppose the whole coastal 'Pleasure Beach' thing was down to the fact that the only real traditional and popular classic Victorian seaside resort staples were Weston, or possibly Torquay. Weston didn't have the geography I guess, and Torquay is probably a little bit too remotely located on a national scale.

In terms of ground up, inland, 1980's style builds, suitable sites seem few and far between. Dunball, just outside Bridgwater is the only one I can think of. Huge ex-industrial land that you can pretty much build anything on, has it's own M5 junction, right next to the railway line, on the way to Minehead, other seaside towns nearby and Glastonbury not a million miles away, not too far away from large population centres, and on the way in and out of Devon and Cornwall.

But even that would have had it's problems back then. The likes of Towers, Chessington, Paultons, Cricket St Thomas already had tourist draws that they were built around. Here, just a smelly cellophane factory (closed in the early 2000's). Instead what we got was a large Morrisons depot and manufacturing facility, loads of warehouses, 3 petrol stations, a Jaguar Land Rover battery plant, and a car auction site. Still more fun than Chessington though.

 

[pjanvil]

Only thing that might be viable is if Longleat added some rides like WMSP then potentially developed into a theme park like Chessington Zoo?

 

[Matt N]

Only thing that might be viable is if Longleat added some rides like WMSP then potentially developed into a theme park like Chessington Zoo?

I don’t think that would be vaguely possible nowadays, unfortunately. Longleat is within the Cranborne Chase AONB, and I imagine that the authorities would not take kindly to rides being built in the grounds of a historic mansion house.

Had Longleat ever wanted to diversify and become a theme park, the time to do something like that would have been the 1970s or 1980s. I think that ship has well and truly sailed now.

Back when Chessington and Alton Towers were turned into theme parks, people were generally more laissez-faire about things like heritage, as well as things like animal welfare and planning restrictions. I dare say you’d never be able to build Chessington or Alton Towers in the present day, and the only reason the authorities put up with them is because of historic precedent for theme parks on those grounds lasting decades.

Even when Tussauds tried to build a theme park in the grounds of Woburn Abbey back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, they weren’t allowed to due to planning restrictions and the need to protect heritage. Woburn Abbey is arguably quite a comparable situation to Longleat, actually, with a stately home and a safari park on the grounds.

 

[TedShatner10]

First post - Longleat is the closest thing to a theme park in my neck of the woods, but yeah, even though it clearly had the potential to become a theme park on a similar scale to Drayton, Chessington, or Paultons, that window of opportunity slipped by around the late 70s to early 00s (and nowadays it sounds like it's very tough for even a relatively massive company like Merlin to maintain the flagship attractions it has to a reasonable standard).

But being a Bristolian, a place like Paultons is a perfectly feasible day trip (being less than two hours away if traffic is light), with Thorpe, Chessington, and Legoland not so much further away (with even Alton and Drayton feasible daytrips at a push, but better as multi-day stays).

 

[pjanvil]

I don’t think that would be vaguely possible nowadays, unfortunately. Longleat is within the Cranborne Chase AONB, and I imagine that the authorities would not take kindly to rides being built in the grounds of a historic mansion house.

Had Longleat ever wanted to diversify and become a theme park, the time to do something like that would have been the 1970s or 1980s. I think that ship has well and truly sailed now.

Back when Chessington and Alton Towers were turned into theme parks, people were generally more laissez-faire about things like heritage, as well as things like animal welfare and planning restrictions. I dare say you’d never be able to build Chessington or Alton Towers in the present day, and the only reason the authorities put up with them is because of historic precedent for theme parks on those grounds lasting decades.

Even when Tussauds tried to build a theme park in the grounds of Woburn Abbey back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, they weren’t allowed to due to planning restrictions and the need to protect heritage. Woburn Abbey is arguably quite a comparable situation to Longleat, actually, with a stately home and a safari park on the grounds.

I wouldn't completely rule it out given the center parc there built a massive waterpark though annoying only for guests. Also I'd counter the reason the authorities put up with alton towers is because its one of the biggest employers in Staffordshire. Though I do agree it would have been easier in the 80s/90s. And the government wonder why they can't generate growth these days (in anything) All the red tape and planning restrictions in the 80s and 90s you could build things.