This topic isn’t related to W+K but it’s kind of related to marketing, in a seasonal sort of way.

The Christie family visited the Hyde Park Winter Wonderland for some festive fun yesterday. We had been hoping for one of those continental-style food and craft markets combined with ice-skating and all the fun of the fair.

The reality was pretty disappointing. In the lane, snow was not glistening and we did not frolic and play the Eskimo way. The pissing rain was hardly the fault of the organisers. But they are responsible for the truculent staff, inadequate facilities and general atmosphere of everything being designed to extract as much money from you as frequently and joylessly as possible. That’s the spirit of Christmas for you.

You had to buy tokens at the gate for the rides. Tokens were £1 each, but could you go on a ride for one token? No you couldn’t: they were all two or four tokens. So the £1 denomination was misleading and only really represented half a token.

It was £8 for a kid’s hot dog and chips at a café. And they were ‘not allowed’ to supply a glass of tap water. (Because that would be free?)

There seemed to be only one toilet block, which was located so far from the ice skating that when we had child toilet emergency, by the time he’d got his skates off, got to the loo and back, via their ridiculously inconvenient system, our skating slot had pretty much expired. When we questioned this we got the classic jobsworth response, “I don’t make the rules; I just work here.”

By this point we had crying kids who had pretty much given up believing in Santa and wanted just to go home. But we’d paid in advance for the big wheel, so by God we were going on it!  Unfortunately the glass pod was pod steamed up it was almost impossible to see out.

Essentially, there was a thin veneer of seasonal tat spread over your standard primitive funfair rides that look likely to drag your kids into the machinery while surly attendants look the other way and argue with someone on their mobile. Not much wonderland, but it lived up to the ‘winter’ bit as it was freezing.

View of parent: “Well it was a mixed experience.”
View of child, “Basically, it sucked.”