Pleasurewood Hills

[Coaster]

Excellent move by the park.

[pluk]

Part of me would love to go back some time, but not having heard good things for a good while now I'm not sure I want to taint my childhood memories, and there doesn't seem to be much if a reason to sadly.

 

Good to see them reopening rattlesnake though, hopefully the start of better things.

[Matt 236]

The lack of activity on this thread doesn’t surprise me at all. 
 

Yesterday I returned to the park, 8 years since my last visit. Last time around, I kinda enjoyed the park but couldn’t say the same this time around. 
 

Lots of closed and removed rides. Galaxy dodgems, Tide Traveler, Tales Of The Coast, Fireball, rowing boats and the stunt show. All but one left empty or left to rot away. The only new rides have been a chair-swing and Rootnin Tootin (formerly Hobbs Pit). Was ok, but nothing special.

 

Park was in a shocking and rather rundown state. Miraculous how some things are still working and standing. Eggspress is just embarrassing for the park now, from feeling like a washing machine on-ride to having to be manually released. Because the locking system is broken.

 

Only real highlights was the sea lion show, which was lovely and the Jolly Rodger drop tower, which is probably my second favourite drop tower now. We all left mid afternoon with no real intentions to return and happy to leave in a way.

 

The place needs some serious investment in both new and existing ride hardware. 

[coasterverse]

I moved to Suffolk in October last year - Pleasurewood Hills is around about an hour and a half away from where I currently live, and I must say I have had absolutely zero intention of visiting since moving here - which, for a theme park enthusiast, should tell you something.

 

The ride lineup (especially the coaster lineup) is absolutely dire for a park of that size. Sure, the park's not massive, but it could be so much more if the Looping Group actually decided to chuck decent money at it like they are doing to Drayton.

 

The fact that the park boast that a Vekoma Boomerang is 'East Anglia's largest rollercoaster and the only Vekoma Boomerang in the UK' (as if a Vekoma Boomerang is anything to brag about...) is absolutely laughable.

 

Even a small scale Gerstlauer Eurofighter like Rage at Adventure Island would increase the appeal to this park tenfold. It's small, compact, decently paced and pretty bloody smooth all things considered - so why not have something like that at Pleasurewood Hills too?!

 

Feels like the Looping Group bought the park as a bit of passive income to keep the company kicking along without doing anything significant investment-wise.

[Matt 236]

We went to Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach, which is essentially just down the road and had a much better time. 
 

That place had atmosphere, a great variety of attractions and a lovely atmosphere amongst some standout rides. Even with the flume gone it was very enjoyable. 
 

Even in just eight years PWH has really become so dilapidated with so many areas rundown, closed or abandoned. Including the high dive show. It may be the most rundown uk park and to be fair quite a lot of our parks are. 

[Matt N]

As someone who's never been, Pleasurewood Hills looks broadly comparable to somewhere like Oakwood, but with weaker major coasters.

 

Don't get me wrong, I do have a soft spot for Oakwood, but I wouldn't like the park nearly as much if it didn't have a great major coaster like Megafobia at its centre and a decent-scale unique thrill coaster like Speed. It's a little hidden gem of a park, but it is definitely made by its coasters for me.

 

I could be being overly presumptuous, but to me, Pleasurewood Hills' coaster draws look vastly weaker than Oakwood's (the main draw I can think of is Wipeout, as I am mildly intrigued to ride a traditional Vekoma Boomerang, but I can get the same experience at numerous parks in Europe and ride numerous more compelling headliners in the same park). And when the park is a 4.5 hour drive away from me on a good run, it does make it a tough sell, unfortunately.

[coasterverse]

Yeah I've got a feeling that the retrack at Oakwood is just the start of bigger and better things to come - it's a shame that Looping Group aren't willing to share any of their budget with Pleasurewood Hills and just seems to give it all to Drayton.

 

The park has so much potential to be great - it's right by the seaside so could be a perfect draw for families all over the country. Even a couple of old second hand coasters to get them started investment-wise would be a good shout rather than them ordering direct from a manufacturer (defo not got the budget for that), but the park is crying out for more coasters.

 

It's such a shame, because if the park had the budget of a park like BPB, Towers, Thorpe, or hell even Drayton, they could really be up there with the big dogs I think.

[Matt N]

I think Pleasurewood’s main problem versus somewhere like Drayton is location. Suffolk is pretty remote, with the nearest major population centres being some distance away, so its draw will naturally be limited. As much as the phrase “If you build it, they will come” is often a favourite, people won’t travel miles to the park, so its feasible catchment area is probably limited by that.

 

By comparison, Drayton Manor is in Staffordshire, so has quite a considerable number of the major population centres within easy reach. It’s pretty much in Birmingham, some boroughs of North London are less than 2 hours away, and some of the big population centres in the North like Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Leeds are less than 2 hours away. As such, its feasible catchment area will be much larger.

I get that the East Anglia seaside is a holiday destination, but that will probably only be the case for a certain cross-section of the population that lives reasonably near to East Anglia. For much of the country, another seaside destination is closer. People living overly far west, south or north probably aren’t going to holiday in East Anglia in the same way that people who live overly far east, south or north probably aren’t going to holiday in Pembrokeshire and visit Oakwood. 

 

It’s also worth noting that Drayton was already a pretty established park with over 1 million visitors per year at the time of the buyout, whereas I’d hazard a guess that Pleasurewood Hills probably gets under 500,000 visitors per year and isn’t an established national brand in quite the same way.