As many of you may know, the Thorpe Park Shark Cabin’s were only ever planned to be a temporary solution and infact, Thorpe Park had planned and even received planning permission to build their own hotel!
The hotel was planned to be built near the Thorpe Park Car Park, to land owned by Thorpe next to the coach parking.
The main documents seen in a planning application from 2011 and even went on to be tweaked and modified up to 2015, seen some exciting plans for the hotel, which would include rooms overlooking Thorpe Park’s Island and would have a three-story hotel and included bar and restaurant facilities, meeting rooms and a health club and would also have it’s own car parking area which would have given much more capacity for Thorpe Park.
In many ways when you look at the plan’s it looks like they were based on the Alton Towers hotel for the planning. The hotel would have had 250 rooms.
To transport guests to the park, they would have their own entrance and infact, rather than a bridge they would have been transported by boat!
Looking at plan’s it would also have provided work for the existing car parking area to make major improvements including to the area’s for buses and taxi’s which also never happened sadly.
Thorpe Park decided that a hotel wouldn’t be suitable for them and rather have stayed with the Shark Cabin’s which were only ever temporary while they then built the hotel.
For us, we do think that having a on-site hotel could have been a great addition especially when they have big events such as Fright Nights.
It’s now something that is in the park’s history, but with the way the park is going with bigger and more thrilling rides you never know what could happen in the future, maybe some day they will re-look at the plans for a hotel to provide extra income especially over closed season?
Founder of ThemeParkRM. Spending most of his time at Thorpe Park and loves The Runaway Mine Train at Alton Towers (choo choo!)
