Thorpe Park’s Early Years
October 6th, 2005 by
James
Thorpe Park is one of my local theme parks that, under the command of the Tussauds Group, has been transformed in the last five or so years.
It has come a long way from the water park opened in 1979 on the site of a former gravel pit (see a great history of the park here).
Every now and then, a few pictures pop up on the web of those early days. Its interesting to see the attractions that used to lay on the site of today’s coasters and other rides.
I hope I’ve gone one better than a few more pictures: I’ve just acquired some 8mm film footage of the park in the very early years of operation.
I don’t know much about the history of the film. I know that it was filmed by an amateur cameraman who was apparently a member of a Surrey film club between the 50s and 70s. The film turned up at a house clearance auction along with a lot of others a while ago, and was in turn sold to me.It was suggested that it was filmed in 1975, although this doesn’t sound very plausible since the park didn’t open until 1979. It has also been mentioned though that this may have been filmed while the park was still being constructed - some kind of preview event? On the off chance that anybody knows anything/can identify something in the film which can help date it, please let me know or post a comment.
I know a few people who will be interested to see it, so I’ve done my best to make it available online as quickly as possible. Thus, so far its only been transferred into a digital format via an old analogue camcorder. The quality isn’t too bad, but of course nothing like that of the film itself.Since film and video have different framerates, there’s some noticeable flicker unfortunately. The next step will be to get this properly (professionally) transferred, before the notorious Super 8 colour fade sets in.
Hopefully this will prove interesting - but please respect my bandwidth by downloading (right click, Save Target As…) the file rather than streaming it from the web server. I know there are a few problems with the conversion into Real Video - I’m aware of these and might put a better version online when I get the proper transfer done.You can download the film from my videos page.Edit: The video is now available in both Real and Windows Media versions
