AT A GLANCE
Pleasure Beach – Great Yarmouth
- Good value day tickets (less so if you pay on a ride-by-ride basis)
- Old fashioned charm
- Great 1930s wooden rollercoaster
- Close to the sea
Pleasurewood Hills – Lowestoft
- Good value day tickets
- Solid array of rides (35)
- Short queues
- Generally unexciting food options
- Site needs a little TLC
PLEASURE BEACH – Great Yarmouth
I love Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach. I shouldn’t. But I can’t help it.
With its rows of arcades and hot dog stands, its pounding pop music and eye-watering sharp edges, it reminds me of one of those travelling funfairs that mysteriously land on village commons for a week in high summer, then vanish in the night, leaving vast circles of dead brown grass.
Pleasure Beach is a travelling funfair that doesn’t travel. Rooted to its spot since 1909, it has all the usual funfair attractions: a swaying pirate ship; a haunted house; spinning tea cups; a house of fun (featuring wobbly mirrors, moving floors and a post-war disregard for risk); ill-lit dodgems; and a carousel seemingly designed to punish anyone wearing tight jeans.
The undoubted star attraction, though, is the wooden rollercoaster. It is genuinely thrilling. Except for the first incline, it races around its 3/4 of a mile track powered exclusively by gravity. The official website almost seems to brag that ‘there are no brakes fitted to the track at all’. It’s one of two wooden rollercoasters left in the UK, and the only one I’ve ever seen that requires a bloke to sit on it all day long, physically yanking an enormous brake lever. Yet, its safety record is exemplary.
I am a sucker for old fairground rides. The ones where you get into a cart with a seat so low that your arse is below sea-level, where you’re locked into an almost foetal position by a wobbly metal bar, and where some old bloke sits in a filthy kiosk, dreaming of his next superking, whilst mumbling ‘enjoy the ride’ for his eight millionth time as your cart rattles past.
For all its thrilling new rides with names like The Pulveriser and Back-Breaking Thunder-Twister, Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach reminds me of the Margate funfair from the 1989 ‘Jolly Boys’ Outing’ episode of Only Fools & Horses. No matter how Pleasure Beach evolves, its past will always show. The place wasn’t even tarmacked until the late 1960s. For fifty years, it was plonked atop the sand on planks of wood.
And that is Pleasure Beach’s real selling point. It is on the beach. When a ride reaches its apex, you can look over the fence and see the North Sea in all its summer greenery. It’s so close to the water that you’d think a high tide might give the rollercoaster a chance to double-up as a log flume. Then, in the other direction, is the hazy aspect of Yarmouth itself, a towering edifice of Georgian naval splendour reduced to a children’s paradise of 2p machines, hot doughnuts, and donkey rides.
I love how, after 115 years, Pleasure Beach still looks portable. Rollercoaster aside, they could probably move the whole thing off-site within a day of receiving an eviction notice.
As always with these places, I would give anything to have a rummage through their annual accounts. How much money does the park make? What’s its biggest earner? Has anyone ever won a cuddly toy from the claw machines?
On the subject of money, if you do go to Pleasure Beach, it is absolutely essential to get a day ticket. Paying for separate rides is something you should only do if you have cash to burn: if, say, you own Microsoft or have recently discovered oil. Otherwise, the day ticket is around £20 and is excellent value.
To get maximum enjoyment from Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach, you must understand what you’re getting yourself into. This isn’t Chessington World of Adventures. It is wonderfully old hat, a living museum of the British seaside holiday.
PLEASUREWOOD HILLS – Lowestoft (ish)
Pleasurewood Hills is not in Norfolk. It lurks somewhere in the hinterland beyond Lowestoft, Suffolk. But as Norfolk is low on the theme park front, it’s worth a mention.
It is, undoubtedly, a lot flashier than Pleasure Beach. The rides are called ‘attractions’. They get a lot closer to touching the sky (and are all securely fastened to the floor). There are big colourful maps everywhere and everything is branded. It has areas for sitting, areas for walking, areas for idling. Tinned music is piped through a network of speakers, repeatedly playing thirty-second ditties of such mind-numbing calibre that you wonder if you’re secretly part of a sociological experiment to see how long it will take to break you.
In short, it looks and feels much more like a theme park.
I have been three times in three years. With each year it has looked several years more tired. The selection of rides doesn’t appear to have changed. When I went in summer 2023, they were digging the foundations of what looked like a new ride. When I went last week, those foundations were just about being laid. With any luck, it should be good to go by 2056.
Nowhere are the park’s blemishes more clearly displayed than on the miniature passenger train that tootles around the grounds. One might think that every area the train passes would be spruced up as a matter of principle. Instead, it drags you through undesirable haunts, via desolate, disused former attractions, dead pools of water, a derelict theatre, and past a workman’s yard that is part Scrapheap Challenge, part Fallout. The carriages are windowless, meaning much of the journey is spent being whipped by the overgrown conifers.
As with Pleasure Beach, the food stalls are manned by mostly confused teenagers. Despite their purported range of wild west and pirate themes, all stalls serve pretty much the same thing: sausage, chips, chicken nuggets. The queues move at a pace that suggests this is everybody’s first day on the job. The prices are steep. You can buy a ‘refill cup’ for around £4. The only snag is, you have to pay full price to refill it. (Rather than a ‘refill cup’, perhaps it would be more accurate to call it simply a ‘cup’.)
You can pay extra for a meal with your entrance ticket, but the utter confusion this voucher brings just isn’t worth the fuss. A ten-minute conversation trying to explain the situation usually ends with a young chap wearing a manager’s badge inspecting the meal voucher and professing to have never seen one before in his life.
To avoid the above chain of events, it’s worth paying £15 for a pizza at the site’s one proper restaurant. If you can get a table.
Despite its flaws, Pleasurewood Hills is great fun for under-14s. None of my curmudgeonly-old-git criticisms seem to be noticed by the kids running about from ride to ride.
Happily, the queues for attractions are much shorter than the queues for food. A day ticket provides easily enough time to sample each of the park’s thirty-five attractions. Among them, are some quite breathtaking live animal shows, including performing seals and a genuinely brilliant live bird exhibition.
Pleasurewood Hills is reasonably priced. Around £25 for a day ticket, or £60 for the largely mythical ‘family of four’. Tickets are free if you happen to be shorter than 90cm (a slightly odd way of letting very young children in, as it also suggests free entry for the cast of Willow). It is a little battered and rough around the edges, but if you have children, they will almost certainly love it.
But I left my heart at Pleasure Beach.
The Norfolk Writer 