What’s the vibe?
The venerable but ever youthful Thorpe Park is an amusement park low on frills but heavy on thrills. The relatively compact attraction, found between Staines and Chertsey, has some cool themed sub areas – the Roswell-style alien abduction area is worth a visit even if you’re not brave enough to tackle its sole ride, The Swarm – but on the whole it’s pretty no nonsense, with little in the way of memorable multi-ride larger zones.
Is it worth visiting?
What Thorpe Park really has going for it is rollercoasters: a veritable arsenal of them, many UK record breakers. On the gentler end you have the bends and twists of the old school Flying Fish, a modified version of Space Station Zero, the park’s first ever rollercoaster, which originally opened in 1984. At the decidedly more thrill seeker side of the spectrum you have Stealth, which was the fastest coaster in the country until May 2024, when its crown was stolen by Thorpe Park’s newest attraction Hyperia (which is, for good measure, also the tallest rollercoaster in the UK).
What’s the age range?
Although relatively young children can technically ride most of the coasters (the height requirement for Hyperia is a modest 130cm), there’s no denying that Thorpe Park is aimed at a more teen/adult audience than, say, Legoland or Chessington.
That said, while my primary school-aged kids wouldn’t touch the more death defying rides with a barge pole, they still had a lot of fun: the Flying Fish is genuinely a perfect starter coaster and they happily went on it three times. Elsewhere the water rides went down a treat: Tidal Wave is an old school log flume whose main USP is a virtual guarantee that you’ll get soaked to the bone; Depth Charge is a short but sweet water slide; Storm Surge is a spinning rapids ride that puts you in big round pods that drift and spin down a giant watercourse in pleasing fashion.
If you don’t want to spend your time at Thorpe Park whimpering your way though a succession of death defying horror coasters then there’s still a fun day out for you (with limited queues!), it’s just not quite the USP.
The highlights
Fortunately I had the opportunity to ditch my family for a bit and mainline a succession of coasters. Hyperia remains the biggie. There is a lot of talk of weightlessness in the bumph for it, and I guess if you’ve ever wondered what it might feel like to drop headfirst out of a plane with no parachute then Hyperia gives you a good idea, with a succession of virtually vertical drops that kind of make it feel like an ungodly tower drop/coaster hybrid. It’s a truly remarkable experience but once was definitely enough.
I went on Saw the Ride with middling expectations, purely because it’s next to Hyperia, but actually its tie in with the big-in-the-‘00s horror franchise (it opened in 2009) is pretty glancing and it’s a fun indoor-outdoor coaster with an absolutely terrifying vertical ascent.
My favourite, though, was The Swarm - aside from having by far the coolest themed area in the park, the wing rollercoaster is just an incredible ride, with various loops and twists but mostly a sense of incredible acceleration and speed that I found genuinely exhilarating, a real enjoyable thrill, not simply a terrifying challenge to pit myself against.
There are slicker, fancier theme parks out there, but if your priorities are an endless succession of white knuckle thrill rides, Thorpe Park has you covered.
Price: Early bird tickets cost £29 and you can get a free return visit.
Address: Staines Rd, Chertsey KT16 8PN
How to get there: Get a 40-minute train from Waterloo to Staines followed by a short bus ride to the park.
Open dates: Reopens March 28th and open daily until mid-November.
Age range: Thorpe Park is recommended for ages 8 and upwards. All children under the age of 12 need to be accompanied by an adult. Children under 1.2 metres go free.