When Walt Disney announced plans to build Disneyland, many commentators speculated that his theme park would prove to be an embarrassing, and expensive, failure. Their view was that Disney should stick to making movies, and that traditional midway operators knew the amusement business better than him.
Those commentators were, of course, completely wrong. Disneyland proved to be an overnight success after opening in 1955, and spawned an empire that now includes theme parks all over the globe. Other firms, such as Universal, have been able to partially emulate Disney’s success.
Sometimes, though, the cynics questioning the wisdom of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a new theme park are proven right. In fact, there are numerous cases of theme parks that collapsed before they even welcomed a single guest. Here are five notorious examples…
5. F1-X Dubai
In the years before the economic crisis of 2008, developers in Dubai dreamed up all manner of construction projects. None, though, were more ambitious than Dubailand – a sprawling theme park complex designed to dwarf even the massive Walt Disney World in scope and scale (in fact, it would be double the size of the Florida resort).
Some 45 “mega projects” were planned for Dubailand, including theme parks from Universal, Dreamworks, Warner Bros., Six Flags, Marvel and Merlin-owned LEGOLAND. In total, it was expected that more than $60 billion would be spent bringing this theme park lover’s dream to life.
The project was announced in 2003, and construction work did indeed begin a few years later. One of the first theme parks to begin construction was the wildly ambitious F1-X, which was to form part of the MotorCity section of Dubailand, which would also include the Dubai Autodrome Formula One race circuit (which opened in 2004). Naturally, it would be themed around motor racing.
The park was the result of a deal between Union Properties and Formula One, which granted the company exclusive rights to build theme parks based on the sport. Some $360 million was budgeted for the park in Dubai, and there were plans to open further Formula One theme parks in Europe and the Far East. In a sign of the times, Union Properties was able to borrow an eye-watering $1.6 billion for the overall project.
F1-X was to boast a Formula One Museum, various grand prix-themed rides and simulators, along with a hotel. The entire park would be themed around a Formula One paddock, with several F1 teams involved in its design. Three bespoke roller coasters would recreate the experience of driving an F1 car.
The park’s downfall came in the face of the global debt crisis in 2008, which brought the insane pace of development in Dubai to a grinding halt. In March 2009, the banks that were funding F1-X suddenly pulled their support, and construction work came to a halt. In July 2010, Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone conceded that the park was “not happening”.
The F1-X park is not to be confused with the similarly-themed Ferrari World, which successfully opened in Dubai’s neighboring emirate Abu Dhabi in October 2010. The Ferrari-themed park is the world’s largest indoor theme park, and hosts the world’s fastest rollercoaster, Formula Rossa.
4. Wonderworld (Corby, England)
It was the early 1980s. Corby, a former steel town in Northamptonshire, England, had been in the doldrums since the closure of a British Steel plant in 1980, leading to a total loss of around 20,000 jobs. “It was almost a one horse town,” recalls instrument mechanic Steve Purcell, and the local authorities were determined to revive it.
Two men, Gerald Baptist and Ian Quicke, felt they had the answer. They wanted to build an enormous, Epcot-style educational theme park and resort dubbed Wonderworld. In Baptist’s words, the park would “create a completely new industry in Corby”, one based around tourism and leisure. The local council were sold on the idea, and the pair formed Group Five Holdings and began to seek funding. 1,000 acres of derelict open cast land owned by the British Steel Corporation were set aside, ready to be transformed into a park that would “out-Disney Disney”.
Derek Walker, the chief architect for the new town of Milton Keynes, was brought in to design the resort. At the heart of Wonderworld was to be an enormous, 450-metre-long glass dome “the size of five football pitches”, reminiscent of the Crystal Palace that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. This would host areas dedicated to land, safety, the “Lost Village”, air and space, communications, the body and the world.
In the area dedicated to the body, guests would ride on a “sausage-style” canoe past “surrealistic” scenes depicting the human interior designed by Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam. Following this tour, they would arrive at a presentation by Dr Jonathan Miller on the “mysteries of the anatomy”, based on his television series The Body in Question.
The communications area would be housed inside a separate structure contained in a transparent bubble, linked to the other areas by a monorail system. Here, school parties and drama groups would be able to make their own television programmes and musical recordings. This kind of “education through participation” would make Wonderworld “superior to Disneyland”.
Image via Dan-Dare.org
The headline attraction in the air and space area would be an observatory designed by astrologer Patrick Moore. Nearby would be a section dedicated to science-fiction hero Dan Dare (expected to generate a fortune in merchandise sales), and much of the area had been designed by Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001, A Space Odyssey. A Second World War-themed flight simulator would round out the line-up.
In the Land area, guests would be able to go on a mock “safari” designed by botanist David Bellamy, which would whisk them past scenes of giant plants, trees and shrubs.
In the Lost Village, meanwhile, characters from famous nursery rhymes would be brought to life. A range of merchandise aimed at children and babies was designed, including Bo Peep furniture, a Boy Blue range of games and Jack Spratt fast food.
Outdoor activities would be concentrated on the outskirts of the sprawling site. This would include an 18-hole golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus, as well as a 10,000-seater sports stadium boasting restaurants and facilities for tuition by leading sports personalities. A huge concert arena, capable of seating 30,000 people, would be designed to resemble a Martian “tripod” fighting machine from War of the Worlds.
Wonderworld was expected to be such a big draw that it would pull in guests for entire holidays rather than just day-visits. To accommodate this, 1,000 lodges would be constructed, along with as many as seven hotels. The resort’s restaurants would serve fast food, but the designers hoped to move away from American dishes and produce English fare instead. The project’s backers predicted that it would attract 4 million visitors per year initially, but that this could rise to as many as 13 million – Walt Disney World levels – eventually.
Image via Northamptonshire Telegraph
Financing was never forthcoming, and the Wonderworld project was finally abandoned some fifteen years after it was initially proposed when the council ran out of patience. The only thing built on the site was a large Wonderworld sign, along with a small cabin. The sole reminder is a scale model, now installed in the Corby Cube, the £47.5m building that opened as part of yet another regeneration scheme for the town in 2010.
3. Wonderland (China)
Construction work on Shanghai Disneyland is now at an advanced stage, with the resort due to open in late 2015. But it would have been beaten to market by some distance by the magnificent Wonderland, if the park’s backers had succeeded in pulling off their plans.
Designed to be the largest theme park in Asia at some 120 acres, Wonderland was located about 20 miles outside of Beijing – giving it access to a potentially huge audience. Like many theme parks in China, it was “inspired” by Disneyland.
Construction began in the mid-1990s. Workers installed an entire village, an enormous parking lot and a massive castle that bore more than a passing resemblance to one of Disney’s creations. When work ground to a halt in 1998, this became a symbol of the park’s failure – as well as of a potential property bubble in China. An attempt to kickstart construction some ten years later failed miserably.
A major reason for the park’s failure to open was that the government had wrestled the land away from local farmers, and they weren’t too happy about it. They opposed the park, and soon returned to begin cultivating the site when financial problems finally killed the project off.
There’s now no hope of Wonderland ever opening, with the abandoned structures having finally been put out of their misery and demolished in May 2013.
2. The Battersea (London, England)
Back in 1983, entrepreneur John Broome was flush with success. Three years earlier, he had converted a former stately home at Alton Towers into the most popular theme park in the UK. Now, he was looking to repeat the same trick elsewhere – and he had his sights set on the UK’s capital.
Just as with his first park, Broome planned to base his next attraction around a listed building. However, the location was even more unusual and potentially problematic than Alton Towers. He hoped to build a massive leisure complex in and around Battersea Power Station, an iconic London landmark situated next to the River Thames in Wandsworth.
Broome acquired the site for just £1.5 million in 1987. He boasted that the theme park would become “London’s Tivoli Gardens”, creating four-and-a-half-thousand jobs in the process and sprawling across a total area of thirty million cubic feet. Broome was intent on creating “the jewel in London’s pleasure industry crown”.
So just what exactly would be on offer at “The Battersea” (the name selected ahead of “Alton Towers II”, “Tower Inferno”, “The Battersea Powerhouse” and “The South Chelsea Fun Palace”)? Well, for an entry fee of £4.50 for both adults and children, guests would gain access to five floors of attractions inside the building, as well as a handful of outdoor rides.
Visitors would enter the Battersea via a spectacular entrance colonnade, surrounded by fountains and terraced gardens. Escalators and glass-walled elevators would transport guests between the floors, with a total of forty rides and two hundred attractions being on offer across the immense main gallery and the two turbine halls. An enormous wall of water would cascade down one side of the building’s interior.
The ground floor of the main gallery would be dominated by a huge ice rink dotted with islands and spectacular dancing fountains. It would host attractions as diverse as a craft village, “entertainment simulators”, a shooting gallery, a mirror maze, an aquarium and a traditional carousel. The simulators would be themed as a “Journey into Tomorrow”, with concept art closely resembling Disney’s Star Wars-themed Star Tours rides (which didn’t open until December 1986). The stand-out element, though, was Charles Dickens’ Street, an “authentic actual village” populated with craft shops and restaurants.
A mezzanine level would host a Disney-style dark ride, featuring three-seater cabins that would pass through sixty animated tableaux populated by seventeen thousand animated figures telling the story of the history of the British Empire . Elsewhere on the same level were “electronic entertainment exhibits”, restaurants and twin cinemas.
Up on the fifth level, Broome planned to install one of The Battersea’s signature rides. This was a balloon ride, which would see riders boarding mock balloons that would swoop around a circuit overlooking the Main Arena.
The outdoor area surrounding the power station, previously used as a coal store, would be put to dual use. Firstly, taking a leaf out of Alton Towers’ book, it would be home to “beautifully landscaped gardens” stretching along six hundred and eighty feet of river frontage. Alongside the gardens would be four major rides, including the enclosed Jumbo Jet Coaster (a custom-designed, Schwarzkopf creation), a Runaway Train, a rapids ride and an observation tower.
The initial cost estimate from Broome for the project was just £34 million – ludicrously low. The budget subsequently leapt to £45 million, then to £170 million. By 1988, the price tag had soared to £240 million.
Construction work finally began in November 1988. It quickly became clear that just getting the basics in place would cost a fortune. Tons of toxic asbestos were found on the site, and there were huge problems with the building’s foundations, which were “virtually non-existent”. On top of this, the UK was in the grip of a recession and the property market was depressed. Work ground to a halt after just four months, but not before the power station’s roof and west wall had been demolished to remove the giant turbines. This left parts of the building exposed to the elements for years, accelerating its decay. Rather than building a theme park, Broome recalls ruefully, “I had to spend 4 months just putting in 300 piles 600 feet deep to pin up the building”.
1. Universal Studios Dubailand (Dubai)
Hidden away in the Arabian Desert is the crumbling corpse of Universal Studios Dubailand, the doomed attempt to bring a Universal theme park to the Middle East. The park was to be the jewel in the crown of Dubailand, and Universal’s very participation seemed to be a way of Dubailand as a whole thumbing its nose at Disney, which opted not to be a part of the resort.
The park was set to be based on the rough template of Universal Studios Florida, but would include a host of unique attractions. This would have included a King Kong-themed roller coaster that would race around a jungle setting, a massive recreation of Jurassic Park and the world’s first ride to be themed around Ghostbusters. There would also be clones of rides from other Universal theme parks, such as a version of the Revenge of the Mummy roller coaster.
Constuction work began in 2008, ahead of a projected opening day in 2010. A trademark Universal entrance archway was built, and it is even reported that track for the King Kong coaster arrived on site ready to be installed.
However, work came to a stop a year later, with the global economic downturn effectively stamping out any hope of it restarting. Universal Studios Dubailand was left standing, abandoned, in the middle of a desert that gradually began to reclaim its unfinished structures.
Universal has a habit of announcing theme parks that never materialise. In recent years, it has promised parks in Korea, Beijing and Moscow, and there’s little sign of any of them actually opening. Will the improving economic climate lead to their revival? We’ll have to wait and see.
In the meantime, that iconic entrance archway in Dubai will continue to lead nowhere…
