Yesterday I ventured over to Staines, Surrey, to make one of my very rare visits to a theme park. Although it is physically located in Chertsey for those of us who don’t have cars, Thorpe Park is a conveniently short shuttle-bus ride away which you can catch just outside Staines railway station.
Thorpe Park was established in the late 1970s with the support of Lord Mountbatten (although it doesn’t bear his name any longer. the domed Mountbatten Pavilion still stands just behind the entrance kiosks) but became what you might consider a theme park proper when its first rollercoaster was installed – the rather modest Space Station Zero (now known as the Flying Fish) in 1983. This was followed in 1989 by a log flume ride which also still exists on the site, ‘Loggers Leap’. Thorpe Park is now one of the attractions owned by the Madame Tussauds group.
On our visit today we experienced all of Thorpe Park’s major rides – the Colossus with its many stomach-churning upside down sections, the Nemesis Inferno where your legs hang out of the car as it careers a fiendishly complicated track that again has several inverted sections, and the latest rollercoaster, the Saw ride (named and themed after the gruesome film series) which has a past-vertical drop that was frankly terrifying! There’s a walkthrough attraction associated with the Saw ride that features live actors but they must have been on strike when we visited because it wasn’t open unfortunately!
I think my favourite ride was the Tidal Wave, a fairly simple ride that has you sitting in a boat which shoots rapidly down a steep incline to create a huge torrent of water around and over the boat – we got absolutely soaked to the skin. It was really weird being surrounded by walls of water on every side!
I’d like to give you a few tips if you’re considering visiting Thorpe Park over the summer. Firstly I’d recommend starting off at Saw – as its the most recent rollercoaster it gets very busy later in the day, but as we turned up about an hour after the park opened the queue was quite short. Secondly, standard adult tickets are quite expensive – they run to around £40 each. However a quick search on Google will furnish you with several 2 for 1 options which we took advantage of, bringing the price down to a far more reasonable £20 which is pretty good value when you consider that there’s a whole day of entertainment and thrills available. Finally I wouldn’t bother with a packed lunch as we found the food prices at Thorpe Park to be surprisingly reasonable – we chose to eat in the caribbean-themed area and the very generous portions came in at less than £7 a head. New for this year they also have an iPhone app which will provide you with queue waiting times, a navigable map and other useful tools.
Something rather mysterious is also coming to the amusement park in 2012, called LC12, but I’ll let you search for that yourself to find all of the relevant details…