Picture the scene: It’s a snowy Christmas Eve, 2030, at King’s Cross station. Dozens of families from across the UK and Europe gather as the station speakers announce: “The train now leaving platform 9¾ is the Hogwarts Express, calling at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. And Bedford.”
The stuff of JK Rowling’s fiction? Perhaps not.
For, if all goes to plan, a featureless 480 acres of industrial and agricultural land a short broomstick’s ride from downtown Bedford will, by the end of the decade, become one of the world’s most spectacular theme parks.
Thanks to some impressive sleuthing by international theme park fanatics, it emerged last week that Universal Studios, owned by the giant Comcast corporation, has been quietly buying up land with a view to developing a theme park and resort on a par with its wildly successful Universal Orlando and Hollywood sites
The company has been desperately trying to damp down speculation about its Bedfordshire plans, insisting it was months away from deciding whether to press on with investing the billions of dollars such a project would cost. “Sometimes,” a source there insisted, “We buy land speculatively but decide against it after our appraisal process.”
Late last week, Universal began the delicate process of engaging with local organisations, mailshotting homes and businesses in the area.
It appears to have done a fair bit of preparation already. Manor Road, a quiet, part-residential road in the village of Kempston Hardwick, bisects the Universal property and has a dozen houses on it.
When asked about the Universal deal, one resident said they had signed a non-disclosure agreement and could not discuss their opinion of the development.
According to neighbours, that house and four others had been sold recently for prices above the market rate.
In reality, though, beside a short-lived Universal venture with a pre-existing Spanish park called PortAventura in the noughties, examples of such mothballed projects are hard to find. And it is understood that the Bedford plot is the only one that Universal owns across all of Europe.
“Look at Universal’s history,” says an admiring rival. “They are going to go, and go big, for sure. Fewer, bigger, better. That is the playbook of Universal.”
It is hard to overstate how important, and how highly regarded, Universal’s theme park business is for Comcast. In just July, August and September, it produced some $983 million (£774 million) of profit — up 20 per cent on a year earlier, on revenues of $2.4 billion marking a new record.
Sources at the company in the US suggest that the plan would be to model the UK site on Universal Epic Universe, a 700-acre site under construction at the Universal Orlando resort. Epic Universe was delayed by Covid, but will feature a mixture of “worlds” — perhaps based on Harry Potter, Super Nintendo and How to Train Your Dragon as well as hotels.
Universal is not limited to using only its own movie characters. A source stressed that it was open to buying in others from rival producers if it felt they would be more popular to a European audience.
However, one veteran park operator said it would be “insane” if it did not use its rights to the Harry Potter ride franchise. The Hogwarts-themed attractions are said to have single-handedly saved the Orlando park because the books and movies are so popular.
One problem: 35 miles down the M1 from Bedford is the Harry Potter Studio Tour, owned by Universal’s arch rival Warner Bros. Under a complex split of the Harry Potter concept, Universal has the rights to theme parks and rides, Warner to anything film and studio related.
The studios tour is massively successful, but some experts question what the impact would be of having a theme park so close by. Would Universal cannibalise from Warner Bros, or vice versa?
One rival in the US said: “Universal don’t really have a choice. Only Harry Potter has the draw to bring the visitor numbers they need. Besides, Harry Potter in England, the home of Harry Potter, they’ve got to do it!”
Warner Bros will not be the only nearby leisure operator looking over its shoulder at Universal’s plans. Woburn Safari Park, Center Parcs, Warwick Castle and, farther afield, Alton Towers to the north and Legoland to the south will also feel the competition.
However, Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UK Hospitality, was confident that the market could easily cater for the newcomer. “The boost from such a site to the local and national economy would be enormous. Not only would the retail sector benefit, but given the UK’s strong creative industry, a Universal Studios in Bedford would also bring in skilled jobs.”
The new Epic Universe is expected to employ 14,000 workers. While it is bigger than the Bedford plan, the UK jobs boost would also number in the multiple thousands, not to mention the construction workers it would employ during the years it would take to build.
Back in Kempston Hardwick, Claudia Pixley, 44, an estate agent and landlord, who also lives on Manor Road, has not sold. She lives with her partner and four-year-old daughter in her three-bed “forever home”.
Her spacious garden backs onto fields. “We haven’t been approached yet but there’s no way we could stay here if they put rollercoasters effectively in my back garden. I can’t go from waking up with the birds singing to ‘scream if you want to go faster’,” Pixley said.
She was furious to hear about the project through the media and says she will be contacting Mohammad Yasin, the Labour MP for Bedford, in the new year. Yasin, though, has already welcomed the project.
Nathan Quigley, a builder who grew up in Bedford, has lived on the street for 25 years and raised his three daughters there. He feels very differently: “Bedford needs this, England needs this,” he said. He predicted that he would sell his house for “close to a million” to Universal and take his daughters to the theme park in 2030.
It is understood no transactions have yet been completed, although the direction of travel seems set. But nothing can be guaranteed in Britain’s notoriously finickity and slow planning world.
Lee Melville, chairman of Stewartby and Kempston Hardwick parish council, said the councillors had no prior warning about Universal’s plans and were “shocked and concerned” by the news. “It’s a great opportunity for Bedford, but only if the infrastructure is put in place to support it,” he said.
But why choose this semi-rural spot near Bedford for Universal’s European flagship? The site Universal has bought is partially brownfield and bracketed by industrial and retail estates, as well as agricultural land. There had been rumours in the leisure industry that it was looking at a seaside spot near Blackpool or buying back into the PortAventura complex.
Alternatives on its hunt for locations will have probably included the Ruhr area of Germany, home to several big tourist parks, and farther south in the country, where the giant Europa-Park’s 13 rollercoasters attract some 5.4 million visitors a year.
“These locations are amazing,” said one leisure chief operating a site there. “You have all the local big population cities of Dortmund, Duisburg, Essen and nearby Dusseldorf. But you’re also within easy travelling distance of the big populations of west and eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the rest of the mainland.”
Yet of all the sites it could have chosen to line up in its portfolio alongside Orlando, Hollywood, Osaka and Beijing, Universal chose Bedford.
Experts said it was all about access to middle class families — ABC1s, in the marketing jargon. One operator compared the potential Bedford park with Universal Beijing, opened in 2021: “They invested about $5 billion to build Beijing. To make that kind of investment stack up, you have to be attracting six to seven million visits a year, paying high prices.”
To put that in context, Alton Towers hosts about three million, and Legoland Windsor about 2.5 million in a typical year.
The financials of major resorts are also based on the idea that visitors will stay over in the park’s hotels for a few nights, adding to the need to maximise the hinterland of wealthy potential customers.
The beauty of Bedford, experts said, is that it is both well situated for major road and rail routes for well-off families in London and southeast England. By road, it is easily accessible via the M1, while it has good rail links to London and Europe via the Thameslink line from Harry Potter’s favourite station, Kings Cross, next to the St Pancras Eurostar terminal.
Universal’s location scouts also point out that it will also be well-served by the planned £5 billion East-West Rail upgrade, boosting services on the line between Cambridge and Oxford and linking to East Anglia, central, southern and western England. Added to which, the land it has bought includes a large former brickworks, built after the Second World War. That suggests the planning process is less likely to be held up or blocked by environmental concerns.
Universal’s plan seems built on far firmer foundations, and it knows the UK is becoming a major outpost for Hollywood industries. After all, with its sister company Sky, it recently built the Sky Studios complex in Elstree where the movie version of Wicked is currently being filmed.
Jim Armitage and Oliver Gill | Graphics by Julian Osbaldstone
Sunday December 24 2023, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times