It will take at least a year to fix up and get safe if they start now and continue over off season and open in May that's quite a long time
It would take much longer than that to do a ride like Pirate Adventure, to anything even slightly near its original standard. Even if it didn't meet the development criteria of the 1990 town and country planning act, it's the sheer scale of work that would be needed. The UK imports virtually all materials for construction these days, no longer produces primary steel, and we've now got to face up to global tariffs that are going to disrupt the supply chain market for virtually everything in terms of goods. All of the PVC, resin, polymer, plaster and clay markets which attraction designers would use for a ride like Pirate Adventure are all experiencing hiking costs.
Plus virtually everything we do construction wise seems to take a million years to complete. It's the way contracts are signed/wages are paid ,due to stupid regulations like IR35 and such.
I hope they take their time too. Not sure what company has the capability and capacity to take on such a large project in this day and age though. All the large teeming companies in the UK capable of such a project closed many years ago. You only have Merlin magic making with the capacity in the UK, it certainly won't be them doing the work. So it will be interesting to see what they do there as there is no one in the UK equipped for such a large project right now, who can do it properly. This is why I fear we may see screens and lots of them.
I'm not sure Merlin/MMM would have the capacity these days. Since the recent closure of Studios North @ AT, they are hugely damaged in their ability to fabricate big stuff directly. And even going back a number of years, most of the stuff they've done design work on recently (Curse, Nemesis) were basically big refurbishment jobs. Or at least relying on existing design frames, and fabricating new fibreglass tentacles and legs using the original designs as a reference. They did do good work on Big bob/Wickerman, but one large set piece is completely different to the kind of sets you would need to create for the 'towns' and 'villages' in Pirate Adventure, which were engineered to fit together.
However, in terms of design studios capable of working on such a large ride, a couple of studios do come to mind with the capability (at least in the scale of design and manufacture that they are capable of) to build a large dark ride, but obvously it is important to remember that the kind of project we are talking about is very unique and would have very specific demands:
Artem ltd are a large design studio, and they've worked on theme park projects in the past. They built some of the large themed props and effects for Tidal Wave (they built the oil tank, its respective original fire effect inside it, the church in the water etc). They would certainly be capable on the engineering and special effects side of things when it comes to building large scale props, and they do some pretty high end animatronics using servo and stepper motors too, so I would doubt that solenoid driven pneumatic figures would be an issue for them, servo assisted or otherwise. They built the large 'Ozzy' the bull for the 2022 commonwealth games, originally mounted on a large drivable telehandler, and now sitting in Birmingham New street, which is one of the most impressive animatronics I have seen in a long time, with an awesome steampunk design. They regularly work with effects systems that use huge amounts of stored energy. They would also know how to use PID closed loop systems to programme real-time animated shows (Golding leisure design used to manufacture controllers and PID systems for closing servo loops, and recording/storing the timed solenoid energisation patterns as data, back when they built Pirate Adventure, which was handy considering the actuations and cylinder specs were similar across most of the figures in the ride). Artem would have all the respective hardware needed for that kind of programming tech too, and they'd know how to work with PLCs for large scale effects systems too. I think Artem would have the capability of working on a dark ride of that scale.
Sarner international (who did a large amount of work on Valhalla back in the day, alongisde the former Farmer studios and Technifex) are also a fairly large design studio. They are also quite well equipped for large scale lighting and show control jobs too. Sarner have a lot of attraction industry experience in general, but looking at their 2025 portfolio they don't seem to lean as much in to mechanical special effects. They would be great on designing themed indoor set pieces built with the consideration of large physical stresses, accessability etc. and because they do both conceptual work, and technical drawings, that would save the need to do more outsourcing. They would probably be good on the scenic art side using the Peter Evans studio set pieces that Pirate Adventure originally had too. But they'd need to work with another company for the animatronic side of things, especially given the number of figures needed for a ride like Pirate Adventure. Meticulous have the immense talent and capability for large scale dark ride design work, too, and they regularly work with animatronics, audio and lighting.
The issue for something like Pirate Adventure is going to be operational costs as much as capital expenditure . You would need someone project managing and directing with exellent team building skills, who knows how to use the appropriate number of workers within a realistic Looping group budget. Plus the costs of ensuring everything is done to the much higher building/fire/ H&S standards we have now, compared to decades ago. To be honest the park really need to practice working with their existing ride effects, and getting as much of them working again as possible, or adding new animated effects to their attractions, before jumping in to a huge effects driven project.
I hope Elise is right and they take their time and get it right without screens.
Yeah most screens and projections are very low effort and people know it.
You could do the ride to a much poorer standard, without high quality show control, but I strongly suspect people would notice. And if word spread that it was a poor imitation of a previous ride, IRL or on social media, then I don't think that would look as good for the park.
