Crinkley Bottom Cricket St Thomas

[Matt N]

Hi guys. While it’s probably one of the lesser known defunct UK theme parks these days, I’m led to believe we have quite a few people on here who grew up in the UK in the 1990s, or were more generally around in the UK in the 1990s for that matter, and know about Mr Blobby and Crinkley Bottom in Cricket St Thomas, Somerset. So I was intrigued to know; did anyone ever visit this park in the brief period it operated? And if so, what did you think?

 

I must say it’s a park that looks intriguing, and quite a strange one to imagine as someone who wasn’t alive in the 1990s. As someone who mainly knows Noel Edmunds as the host of Channel 4’s Deal or No Deal, I can never imagine him being a big celebrity with a huge TV show and theme park like that, but him and Mr Blobby were apparently huge in the 1990s!

 

I mainly posted this thread, though, because I’m currently staying in a lodge complex in Chard that’s only around a mile’s walk from the former site of Crinkley Bottom. As such, my dad and I took a walk down there today to see what we could find, and while the site is now a Warner hotel and no longer looks remotely theme park-like, like most other stately homes in Britain, there are still a few little oddities there to find if you know where to look. I mostly took pictures of stuff that I thought looked vaguely theme park-y, and like it could have been part of Crinkley Bottom, but having consulted a Crinkley Bottom park map and looked online after getting back to our lodge, I actually wasn’t far off. I did take a few photos that I thought might be of interest to you guys.

 

For reference, here’s the map me and my dad used, as a point of reference:

(Credit to dunblobbin.com for this image: https://www.dunblobbin.com/park-map)

 

Firstly, here are a few oddities I found that looked like they might have been from when it was a wildlife park:

And then we came to what was unmistakably the former railway bridge:

And I also photographed this building that was apparently home to the Animals of Farthing Wood attraction according to the map:

After that, we crossed what was marked as the Flamingo bridge on the park map, walked along the former railway line, and walked back to the other side along the Crinkley Bridge, at which point I photographed a distinctly colourful looking building, which I later ascertained was the Crinkley Bottom Art Gallery, with what looked like the Extremely Nice Thingy Shop next to it (possibly not in the photograph):

(It looked more colourful and stood out more in person… I was zoomed in a lot here)

 

We then came to the Holey Tree, listed on the park map:

 

And finally, we then took a walk up to Cricket House itself:

 

But that’s not all! As it turns out, the very track we walked down to get there used to be the track for the safari (which you can see once you know that was the case), and we also saw a tunnel that used to be Mr Blobby’s Lair, supposedly! (I didn’t photograph that because my dad thought it looked too new to be part of the park)

 

So I definitely had a very productive and interesting afternoon here in Chard; I hope you like my photos of remnants of this slightly more obscure piece of UK theme park history! Did anyone ever get to visit this interesting attraction, or do you remember it?

[Matt N]

Sorry to double post, but for those who have absolutely no idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a documentary by Expedition Theme Park, for a bit more info on what Crinkley Bottom actually was:

https://youtu.be/Prr59WolXv4