The UK: land of tea, history… and amazing coasters. Compared to many other countries across Europe, here in the UK we aren’t exactly known for our thrilling rides and rollercoasters, with many UK parks, particularly in the South and East, going for a more immersive, themed approach. However, British theme parks are home to many incredible coasters, from fear-inducing accelerators to rides that invert 10 times or more, forcing the stomachs of riders to go through all the twists and turns of a rough ride. With many parks currently closed, lets take some time to celebrate some of our best and most innovative coasters, and count down, in no particular order, the record breaking and “first” coasters of the UK!
Oblivion, Alton Towers
Don’t. Look. Down. That’s the slogan for Oblivion, the world’s B&M dive coaster, at Alton Towers, in Staffordshire, England. Opened in 1998, Oblivion was advertised as “the world’s first vertical drop rollercoaster” by the park, with the tagline being used on radio, TV and other ads. However, this was not actually the case. Sure, this coaster was the world’s steepest at the time of it’s opening, but it’s drop isn’t entirely vertical, at just 87.5°! I know, it annoys me, too.
Oblivion is located in X Sector, and to fit with the sinister, dystopian theme of the area, a shady advertising campaign was used throughout the ride’s construction, the highlight of this being the secretive figure in a bright orange suit, that stood outside the site, answering no questions from inquisitive visitors, simply telling them to “clear the area”, and saying vague commands into a walkie talkie. Behind him, a hole in the ground, that seemed to just be getting deeper and deeper.
By the opening, Alton Towers’ seemingly random changes, including the removal of many rides from the site X Sector is on now, suddenly made sense. Oblivion was a project fit for the new millennium, with a futuristic theme, a modern design and a thrilling experience which continues to terrify visitors even today!
Colossus, Thorpe Park
Going further South towards Chertsey, London, there’s an island like no other, and this island is none other than Thorpe Park! This park has several different themed lands, known as territories, and many are located on their own small islands! With a focus on creating thrilling coasters and flat rides, Thorpe attracts hundreds of enthusiasts and thrill seekers each year, but it hasn’t always been this way. Up until the year 2000 the island theme park was actually aimed at families, particularly those with young children, before a major fire destroyed two family favourite attractions and partly damaged many other buildings around the park, triggering a sort of thrill movement that made Thorpe Park what it is today. To learn more about the Thorpe Park Fire of 2000, check out the link at the bottom of this article, which will take you to another of my articles discussing what happened, and how it still affects the park today!
After the fire several flat rides were added to Thorpe Park throughout the 2001 season, but 2002 brought the first coaster of the new thrill era, a ride that smashed the current record for most inversions- Colossus opened in March of that year with ten!
Manufactured by Intamin, this custom looping coaster features multiple heartline rolls, a cobra roll, and a double corkscrew as well as other inversions, and, while many enthusiasts today consider Colossus one of the roughest coasters in the UK, it is still a feared favourite among many park-goers!
Galactica (Air), Alton Towers
When designing Alton Towers’ Secret Weapon 5, attraction designer John Wardley decided that the park’s next coaster should allow riders to experience the feeling of flight, and, with a similar vision, Bolliger and Mabillard, or B&M, agreed to build this at-the-time ambitious creation at the Towers, just across from another of his coasters, Nemesis. After years of experimentation a decision for the ride’s design was finally reached: when riders were safely locked into their seats, said seats would be rotated back so as to be facing downward, giving a sensation of flying.
The model became known as a flying coaster, and although many B&M flyers exist at parks around the world today, the idea was revolutionary at the time, creating a ripple of safe and comfortable innovation within the theme park industry, that still exists today. The coaster opened complete for the 2002 season as Air, with less theming than Alton Towers’ other thrill coasters, however many argue that the overall experience makes up for the lack of theming, and I agree!
Air continued to operate until 2015, when the ride when down for a retheme after 13 years of operation. A year later the coaster reopened as Galactica, with added theming and a new VR aspect. Throughout their VR experience riders would embark on a journey through space, with stars, meteors and… technical problems. The use of VR on a coaster was groundbreaking in itself, no other park had dared to try it before, and at the time of Galactica’s opening the technology was not completely perfected, leading to issues with the audio, visuals and sometimes even both! The VR goggles were a maintenance nightmare, so much that they were removed for the 2019 season just three years after they were added.
Today Galactica continues to operate without VR in Forbidden Valley, as the second coaster to be added into the area after Nemesis in 1994.
The Smiler, Alton Towers
For this one we’re coming back to Alton Towers, to that sinister little corner of the park known as X Sector! When ride safety regulations were updated in the 2000s, the Black Hole, the park’s indoor Schwarzkopf Jet Star 2, was forced to close due to Alton Towers not wanting to update the ride. The tent that housed the coaster was used as a location for ScareFest mazes and other events for several years, before it’s demolition in 2012.
By 2012 it had been two years since the opening of the Towers’ most recent coaster, Th13teen, and park-goers wanted something new. Planning permission for a new rollercoaster had been submitted and approved earlier that year, but the new ride had to be compact enough to fit in the small empty space left over by the Black Hole’s closure. On top of that, Alton Towers wanted the new coaster to be record-breaking- the record for the most inversions had to be smashed, with at least two more than the current record of ten. John Wardley and several other designers experimented with different designs and ideas, and came back with a design that incorporated the required twelve inversions, plus two more!
Throughout The Smiler’s construction the park released promotional materials and videos to grow a hype for the opening- and this included spray painting local sheep with the ride’s logo! If that doesn’t scream ‘England’, I don’t know what does. A backstory was also created, centring around two students researching psychology and the fictional government organisation the Ministry Of Joy, which aimed to correct society by forcing the world to smile. The students met Miles Cedars, the Ministry’s first test subject, and found some video tapes in his home, leading them down a rabbit hole through the story of The Smiler- all of this can be found on Alton Towers’ YouTube channel!
Due to technical issues this record-breaking rollercoaster opened a few months later than originally planned- instead of opening for the beginning of the 2013 season, The Smiler opened to the public on May 31st! The opening year was plagued with issues: from trains valleying on the track, to the safety system constantly stopping the ride, to extensive maintenance forcing the ride to go down A LOT, 2013 certainly didn’t go the way the park had planned. It turned out these were just teething issues however, and for over a year the ride continued to operate as normal- that was, until June 2015.
Warning- the following content may be distressing to some viewers, if you feel you may be disturbed by this, skip to the next ride.
The ride’s manufacturer, Gerstlauer, had stated that the ride could not operate in high winds, like those of 2nd June 2015. It was a busy summer day at Alton Towers and the ride operators on The Smiler made the decision to add a fifth train to the coaster in order to reduce queue times and control the crowds. When the ride was forced to go down for maintenance, this fifth train was released, and during testing, it valleyed on the batwing element, and as a train full of riders was released, the safety system stopped it on the lifthill, sensing the train on the track. A lack of communication between park operation and maintenance led to engineers overriding the safety system, and the train crashed with massive impact into the train already on the track, at a speed of 90mph, similar to a high speed car crash. Three teenagers in the front row of the train suffered life-changing injuries, while other riders suffered injuries that were less severe.
The next day Alton Towers closed out of respect for the victims of the accident, and when it opened a few days later many rides remained closed, including Hex, Duel and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. About year later the majority of the closed rides reopened, including The Smiler, with new safety regulations incorporated into the ride’s operations, and the previous references to correction removed.
I want to add that this kind of incident is extremely rare, and when they do occur, it’s always almost as a result of human error- amusement rides, particularly rollercoasters, go through meticulous safety checks every day to ensure the utmost security for riders. Theme parks are statistically very safe: you are more likely to be injured while travelling to the park, than at the park itself. The Smiler crash of 2015 resulted in a massive change within the amusement industry, safety rules were updated and today, Alton Towers is one of the safest parks in the world.
Log Coaster, Gullivers Kingdom Matlock Bath
This one is pretty obscure. Chances are you’ve ridden at least one kiddie coaster before, whether it be when you actually were a kid, or as an enthusiast “just for the credit” (come on, we’ve all done that before!) Many of us have heard about some of the better known kiddie ride manufactures, Zamperla etc. but have you heard of the mysterious Cavazza Diego and it’s even more mysterious Super Nessi Junior Coasters?
No one really knows much about Cavazza Diego and it’s coasters, when doing research on this small manufacturer I could hardly find anything about it, however it seems the company originated in Italy, and built rides in parks across the world, from the US to the Philippines! Two coaster models are known to be built by Cavazza Diego, the Blizzard and Super Nessi Junior Coaster models, but, strangely, there is no documentation linking the coasters and the company, while other ride manufactures patent their projects so they cannot be stolen or copied, Cavzza Diego either didn’t care, or didn’t have the means to do this.
If you want to learn more about Super Nessi Junior Coasters and their unique layout, check out this POV of Dino Roller at Flamingo Land!
What we do know however, is that many Blizzards and Super Nessi Junior Coasters were built in parks and attractions across the UK, with the company’s first ever Super Nessi being in a park located in the Midlands of England: Gulliver’s Kingdom Matlock Bath! Nestled among Derbyshire woods, Gulliver’s Matlock Bath is truly a park in the middle of nowhere, that until 2018 was home to two coasters, Switchback and the iconic Log Coaster! Switchback closed in Summer 2018, leaving the world’s first Super Nessi as the only rollercoaster in the park!
Manufactured in 1986 but not officially opening until the year after, Log Coaster was one of the first rides to open at Gulliver’s, and was a favourite at the park from the very beginning. Today this classic kiddie ride continues to operate at the park, however very few people know of Log Coaster’s legacy, and the mark it left on theme parks across the world!
Th13teen, Alton Towers
Aaaaaaaand we’re back at Alton Towers for the last coaster on this list. As you’ve seen, much of the UK’s coaster innovation can find it’s roots at the Towers, and Th13teen is no exception. Throughout this ride’s construction, Alton Towers’ media team did a great job of creating a terrifying theme for the ride, with Internet and TV ads advertising Th13teen as the most petrifying ride ever created, with large amounts of it’s promotional material calling it a ‘psycoaster’, combining words ‘psycho’ and ‘coaster’, which already have terrifying enough associations, and suggesting that riders may even need to sign a waiver before boarding the attraction!
The main aim of these marketing strategies however was to tell pretty much everyone about Th13teen’s never seen before element- and this is what sets this coaster apart from the rest! When advertising Th13teen the park decided not to reveal what the element is, in order to up the fear factor, similar to Kings Island’s advertising of Mystic Timbers, just 5 years earlier! Much speculation grew surrounding this “hidden element”. Would it be more frightening theming? An inversion? Something even scarier?
At this point I feel I need to issue a spoiler alert from here on in: if you have not yet ridden Th13teen and want to keep the mystery element a surprise, do not read on!
You kept scrolling, I warned you, so lets do this. For all Th13teen’s terrifying ads, it turned out to be an Intamin Family Coaster, at first glance no different from any other family coaster, other than the creepy theming, of course. But Th13teen wasn’t just a family ride. At the end of the relatively tame layout, riders are taken into what looks like an abandoned building, and held stationary for several seconds, before being dropped to a lower segment of track and launched backwards!
Like many of the coasters on this list, the concept seems so obvious now, and there are so many rides with a similar or identical concept around the world. But at the time of Th13teen’s opening at the beginning of the 2010 season, the idea was revolutionary: the Intamin Drop Coaster!
But remember, if you’re going down to the woods today, you’d better not go alone…
Have you ridden any of the coasters on the list? Which is your favourite? Let me know in the comments below!
Your articles are amazing. Thank you for your hard work.
It’s definitely worth a visit! 🙂
Interesting! Never heard of that park before
Love this Lily
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Photo credits:
@roller_coaster_rachel on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/roller_coaster_rachel/
@lift_hills_and_launches on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lift_hills_and_launches/
@thorpe.towers on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thorpe.towers/
@coaster_paradox on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/coaster_paradox/
User PLTRON on Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gulliver%27s_Kingdom_-_Rides.jpg
@thrillridesuk on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thrillridesuk/
ThrillridesUK YouTube channel- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqmGn3VO2-TflkqnDZw4gkA
Video credit:
Coaster Review on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-ZQ06UakGCrfXZWZXWsFTQ
Coaster Dreamers 
Thank you so much! I’m so glad you enjoy them. Sorry about the late reply -Lily 🙂