Thanet District Council in Kent has agreed to dispose of a theme park it rescued almost a decade ago to stop the attraction from exposing the council to “unsustainable” future costs.
The Dreamland heritage theme park in the seaside town of Margate, which dates back 100 years, was closed and fire-damaged when Thanet agreed to co-ordinate its Compulsory Purchase Order driven restoration in 2011.
In a report to an extraordinary meeting of Thanet’s cabinet last week, council S151 officer and deputy chief executive Tim Willis said the authority’s actions had brought an iconic theme park “with a very troubled past” back to life. But Wills said Dreamland was now ready to be returned to private ownership to secure its long-term future.
Willis’ report said Dreamland had always struggled commercially and represented a “current and potential liability to the council, with current and future costs which are unsustainable”.
He said the site’s current leaseholder and operator, Sands Heritage Ltd, had a vision to run Dreamland as part of a wider hotel and conference-centre offering for the site that would “safeguard” the park’s future and support regeneration in the town.
2nd Housing & Regeneration Finance Summit
County Hall, October 31st, 2019
The report urged cabinet members to authorise the council to support the disposal of the site to the business to “unlock the continued regeneration of other parts of the site” and generate capital receipts.
Thanet gained its Dreamland CPO in 2012 and subsequently secured £11.4m in government grants and lottery funding for the project to reopen it, augmented by £8m in borrowing on the part of the council.
Its grade II* listed “Scenic Railway” wooden rollercoaster – the oldest of its kind in the country – was restored and as part of a refurbishment package for the park, overseen by designers Wayne and Geraldine Hemingway.
Dreamland reopened in June 2015, but operator Sands Heritage Ltd went into administration later the same year with what Thanet described as “a great deal of debt”.
The business was later bought by hedge fund Arrowgrass, which still owns Sands.
Willis’ report to Thanet cabinet members accepted that there would be risks related to selling the freehold of the Dreamland site, its rides and intellectual property to Sands for a price equal to or better than an independent valuation the council has already obtained.
He said it was possible that Sands could seek to develop the site in a way it had not yet discussed with the council, but added that the business had stated it had “no plans to do this”.
Willis also said Thanet would require a restriction on parts of the sale site being redeveloped for housing for a period of 10 years.
The report said other complicating factors for disposing of the Dreamland site would include freeing the district from obligations attached to the grants received from the project from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
But Willis concluded that Dreamland had a “slim chance of survival as an amusement park alone” and that the Sands vision would offer a “critical mass” that made the most of the site’s history and supplemented it with “commercially sustainable” activities.
He said that Sands – via Arrowgrass – had “access to funds and a risk appetite that Thanet would never have, as well as greater scope to implement a new vision”.
Cabinet members took fewer than 10 minutes to support the recommendation to pursue the sale of Dreamland to Sands.
Earlier this year the borough scaled back its plans to reopen the Channel port of Ramsgate to ferry services as a government bid to create a Brexit contingency route between the town and Ostend in Belgium.
