What's new

Universal considering UK theme park in Bedford

Hm, debatable. Anyway, let's not... derail... the thread too much.
The real answer why there are less naysayers for Universal is because it affects far less people.
The second reason is Universal has obvious benefits that are easily communicated. Convincing people of the benefits of a costly road/train track paid for by the taxpayer is difficult. Selling 10,000 extra jobs and £10bn investment from private companies is easy.

The third one is the name. Even those who don't go to Orlando probably see the place as quite touristy, flashy, fancy, full of fun, and a bit magical and mysterious. Whether that's true or not doesn't matter. The same connotations hold with the idea of creating Orlando in the UK (even if the reality if far from it).
 
With the election, presumably everything on this will be on hiatus until a new Secretary of State is appointed.
 
I wouldn't have thought it constitutes a delay at all though - the "system" (run by civil servants not politicians) will keep running without the person in the named role being around to make a decision - it'll only be 6 weeks until there is another person in that role anyway.
 
I wouldn't have thought it constitutes a delay at all though - the "system" (run by civil servants not politicians) will keep running without the person in the named role being around to make a decision - it'll only be 6 weeks until there is another person in that role anyway.

Yup, maybe. I suppose it depends on how it works behind the scenes. I personally wouldn’t ask my team to invest any significant time in a contingent project, when there are other business as usual projects requiring attention, if there was an ‘absolute political nope’ on the cards that might mean everything goes in the bin.

As part of agreeing the planning, I presume there is a deal to be done on infrastructure costs / reliefs. Who knows how Labour will position itself on that sort of thing…
 
Yup, maybe. I suppose it depends on how it works behind the scenes. I personally wouldn’t ask my team to invest any significant time in a contingent project, when there are other business as usual projects requiring attention, if there was an ‘absolute political nope’ on the cards that might mean everything goes in the bin.

As part of agreeing the planning, I presume there is a deal to be done on infrastructure costs / reliefs. Who knows how Labour will position itself on that sort of thing…
The same as the last one. You have to be incredibly brave and have the political nous of a pack of crayons to be against a project of this magnitude. If anything, they’ll try promoting it to showcase how good they are in their role and take the credit
 
Last edited:

Definitely promising news. The powers that be have accepted that the planned Wixams station is simply not sufficient to support a Theme Park development at the scale of Universal. They want to build a bigger station. This definitely shows a level of confidence in the project consistent with what we've seen so far.

I'd expect it to look something like Brent Cross West when done, opened late last year on the same line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Cross_West_railway_station
 

Definitely promising news. The powers that be have accepted that the planned Wixams station is simply not sufficient to support a Theme Park development at the scale of Universal. They want to build a bigger station. This definitely shows a level of confidence in the project consistent with what we've seen so far.

I'd expect it to look something like Brent Cross West when done, opened late last year on the same line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Cross_West_railway_station

Toh Just down the road from me! They better turn that shxxhole of a station into something decent. 😁
 
HERE is a news article published by Sky with more details.

Assume we'll be seeing a video news report quite soon as well if the film crew were spotted on site.
 
Seems like maybe an internal decision has already been made to ahead with this, otherwise why would they still be releasing all this stuff? Didn't people say there were told at the meeting that the decision was meant to be made in June?
 
Top