This was once a hugely popular theme park for generations of children — now it’s empty (Image: John Myers)
It was once a large and hugely popular theme park which thrilled generations of schoolchildren. Today its remains sit quietly in a rural part of the UK with the hustle and bustle of thrill-seeking visitors now a distant memory.
Oakwood Theme Park announced in March last year that it would not open for the 2025 season and beyond, confirming a permanent closure which brought the curtain down on a roller-coaster ride of an attraction which lasted almost 40 years. The Pembrokeshire park announced the closure with “much sadness” as the declining number of visitors resulted in financial struggles. It was given the unwanted name of the “UK’s worst theme park” by visitors in recent years.
Aspro Parks took over Oakwood in 2008 and invested millions of pounds into the theme park. However, last spring it said that “unrelenting economic challenges” from “ride parts to electricity costs, food and beverage inflation, increases in the National Living Wage and changes to national insurance thresholds” resulted in a substantial increase in costs.
Welcome to Oakwood 2026: the now closed theme park which drew in huge visitor numbers for almost four decades (Image: John Myers)
Despite hopes that the park would reopen, it has sat closed and empty for the last 10 months, with rides having been dismantled and removed from the site.
The park is located around five miles from the bustling Pembrokeshire town of Narberth (Image: John Myers)
It drew in huge visitor numbers for almost four decades but today what was once one of the UK’s best visitor attractions lies dormant and eerily quiet. The site is manned by security with additional counter surveillance measures in place to stop trespassers.
The iconic Megafobia rollercoaster opened in 1996 and was one of the park’s main attractions for years (Image: John Myers)
The future of the site is unclear as we begin 2026 (Image: John Myers)
In 2024, reporter Taite Johnson visited the site which was full of “many memories of her regular summer days out” for her. She said “going as an adult it felt very different and the magic of it felt lost to me”. Once, long queues would have awaited visitors at the entrance.
But Taite said: “When we got to Oakwood we were shocked at how few visitors there were. We arrived at 10.15am, just 15 minutes after the park opened, along with only a handful of other cars in the car park.”
The Vertigo attraction at the park (Image: John Myers)
The now closed park is set within acres of Pembrokeshire countryside (Image: John Myers)
She also picked up on the lack of security checks, which made her feel uneasy: “I was slightly concerned with the lack of security checks before we entered the theme park. Both my friend and I had backpacks that didn’t get searched at all, which I would have expected when visiting a large park where a lot of people could have been – although granted that day there were hardly any visitors.”
The park had lots of rides for young children (Image: John Myers)
“The park seemed dreary and run down,” she added. “Not much had changed since I visited as a child which did give me a sense of nostalgia, but didn’t fill me with excitement to explore it all again.”
Oakwood’s owners said ‘unrelenting economic challenges’ had forced the closure of the theme park (Image: John Myers)
It said these challenges included ‘ride parts to electricity costs, food and beverage inflation, increases in the National Living Wage and changes to national insurance thresholds’ (Image: John Myers)
Despite hopes that the park would reopen, it has sat closed and empty for the last 10 months (Image: John Myers)
One thing any visitor to a popular theme park will have experienced is the long queues for rides, which in Oakwood’s heyday were as long as any other theme park in the country. But in 2024, Taite said “that was not a problem when I visited Oakwood this week”.
She said: “I did not queue for any of the rides I went on, and even got to stay in my seat and ride again for one of them. That may be due to the weather but one of the rollercoaster attendants told me that the day before – which did not see any rain – one visitor rode the same ride 50 times in one day!”
Megafobia was for a number of years the biggest draw at the theme park (Image: John Myers)
The park is now eerily quiet (Image: John Myers)
While hugely popular in the 1990s, more recently it was often described as the “worst theme park in the UK” with many social media influencers using the attraction for content to humour audience members. It had well over 1,000 negative reviews on TripAdvisor, and was also described as a place to “avoid at all costs!”
Reoccurring complaints around value for money, poor maintenance and hit-and-miss availability of rides were the most common complaints.
Many of the old attractions still remain (Image: John Myers)
Oakwood was once a large and hugely popular theme park which thrilled generations of schoolchildren (Image: John Myers)
Its most famous ride, Megafobia, will never be used again (Image: John Myers)
When another reporter, Rhodri Harrison, visited in 2021, his first impression was how steep the cost of entry was compared to other parks with more rides, saying: “Booking and paying online came to £35.50, a steep price when considering other theme parks in the UK are slightly cheaper with more rides.”
He arrived to find immediately that its most famous attraction, Megafobia, was closed and said: “Upon getting to the park the first wave of disappointment hit.”
Describing many of the rides as “worse for wear” even back then, he also noticed how few people ther were: “Perhaps a sign of how much quieter the park has gotten in recent years, I remember waiting nearly an hour for Megafobia and even longer for Speed and Drenched but that wasn’t the case this time round.”
