Blackpool Pleasure Beach Financial Health

The information below is based on filings to Companies House by BLACKPOOL PLEASURE BEACH LIMITED (Company number 01876267). Other information has been taken from RCDB, Wikipedia and local news papers. I am not an accountant nor am I a financial adviser.

© Blackpool Pleasure beach

With the recent announcement of the ICON opening date, which is planned for the 25th May 2018, along with the news of some rides being closed during Monday to Friday during April and May it has lead to many questions in the enthusiast community about the financial state of Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

To this end I went onto the Companies House website and searched for Blackpool Pleasure Beach. I found all of the account filings dating back to 1987. Each account was filed around the start of the next season, the end of March or the early April.

I put the year, overall profit and the fixed assets into a spreadsheet and created a graph. It shows a fascinating recent history of the Pleasure Beach.

All Data from Companies House Filings, data compiled by Simon Stirrat

Feel free to explore the spreadsheet here. If anyone has access to the filings pre 1987 please contact me, I’d love to add to the data.

The ‘Profit’ is the profit as reported by the annual filings. The ‘Fixed Assets’ relates to all of the rides, infrastructure, buildings, fittings and anything else that is owned by Blackpool Pleasure Beach. You can see several upward jumps, these generally relate to new investments in the park. Over time assets depreciate in value which will cause the line to drop. Any ride which is removed and scrapped or sold will also cause a drop in ‘Fixed Assets’ value.

Avalanche, opened 1988, is a Steel Bobsled Coaster. Avalanche increased profit by £741,546 between 1987 and 1988. It increased ‘Fixed Assets’ by £3,024,566

The Big One (then known as The Pepsi Max Big One) was opened in 1994, it is an Arrow Dynamics Hyper Coaster. Between 1993 and 1994 it increased ‘Profits’ by £3,061,408 and increased ‘Fixed Assets’ by £9,568,798.

Valhalla is a water ride manufactured by Intamin, it opened in 2000. It cost £15,000,000 to build. Between 1999 and 2000 ‘Profit’ decreased from -£321,000 to -£368,000. ‘Fixed Assets’ increased by only £2,240,000. This is a bit of an anomaly. The Annual Filings don’t give a reason but an educated guess would be the cost of removing rides to accommodate Valhalla caused a smaller than expected ‘Fixed Assets’ increase. The high cost of Valhalla probably impacted on the overall ‘Profits’

Nickelodeon Land opened in 2011 and replaced the Beaver Creek area. All of the rides were either new or rethemed. This investment really helped financially the Pleasure Beach after the closure of Pleasureland Southport and the associated costs involved with it.

In 2017 Blackpool Pleasure Beach had debts of £23,323,000 and they paid £654,000 in interest. This is an increase from debts of £21,034,000 with £617,000 paid in interest.