Fairytale Farm in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, is enjoying a double celebration this year.
2023 marks the accessible farm park’s 10th anniversary. The farm was opened in 2013 by then prime minister David Cameron and was the first visitor attraction in the UK to be accessible to all. Here, everything is designed with the needs of disabled children in mind – so that everyone can come and have fun.
It is also celebrating the opening of a new outdoor area, Fairy Dell.
Fairytale Farm sprinkles everything with a large helping of fairy dust and thoroughly embraces its theme. New attractions have been added every year, keeping the experience fresh for visitors and ensuring healthy growth.
From alpacas to a wilderness walk
Features include eco-friendly turkey sheds, a wilderness walk, and an alpaca that became famous for predicting the future (badly). The park has also recently launched a significant new outdoor area, Fairy Dell, where visitors feel they have shrunk to the size of fairies. Here, blades of grass tower over you and mushrooms rise up three storeys high.
Owner Nick Laister tells blooloop about the evolution of the attraction.
“My training is planning – town and county planning. I’m a Chartered Town Planner. And I’ve been working in planning consultancy since 1992.
“I very quickly got involved in visitor attractions. Initially theme parks, and spread out to other types of attractions – farm attractions, zoos, and also holiday parks. That tends to be when an attraction wants to put in a new big ride or a roller coaster or maybe a hotel or some holiday lodges, that’s where I come in. And I’ve been doing this for 30 years.”
An inclusive experience for the whole family at Fairytale Farm
“The idea of Fairytale Farm really came out of two things. One was my daughter. I’ve got four kids. My oldest daughter, Olivia, has got cerebral palsy and what we found was that whilst most mainstream attractions do their best for the disabled member of the family, there’s always an element of them sitting slightly on the sidelines whilst the other members of the family enjoy themselves.
“And similarly, there are places designed for disabled children, but they’re not really aimed at the other kids. Most people who have a disabled child in their family like we have, also have brothers and sisters who aren’t disabled.”
“So the whole idea of Fairytale Farm was to try and find that middle ground where we design everything around accessibility, and keep making it as inclusive as possible. And we think about the disabled person first when we’re actually designing something. However, we design it in such a way that the whole family can enjoy it.”
“The whole idea of Fairytale Farm is that it’s an inclusive experience that the whole family can enjoy together. So it was a combination of our experiences with Olivia and our other kids and my involvement in the industry. That got me thinking there is a little niche in the market for somebody to do something like Fairytale Farm.
“So we did it and opened it 10 years ago.”
Consider invisible disabilities
When asked what advice he would offer attractions working to become more accessible, Laister suggests:
“Accessibility, in a lot of people’s minds, means wheelchair access.
“But of course, remember that most disabled people are not in wheelchairs. So it’s actually about the often invisible disabilities, the sensory disabilities, the people who are perhaps on the autism spectrum, or people who are deaf, or people who have been under so many, so much more.
“And that’s really what I learned. For our daughter, her issue is wheelchair access. But my main advice is to not just think of the wheelchair access. It’s to try and go beyond that and think about all the other issues and disabilities. You cannot make every single piece of equipment accessible to every single disability. It just will not happen.”
“So for example, we’ve got a wheelchair swing. That’s obviously great for people in wheelchairs, but it’s no good for all the other disabilities that people have.
“We say everything accessible. Everything’s accessible in one way or another for different disabilities.
“But you can’t really go on the wheelchair swing if you’re not in a wheelchair.”
See also: SEE MONSTER: “No excuse not to make attractions accessible”
Sensory play and sustainability at Fairytale Farm
Fairytale Farm offers visitors six main zones, including the Huff and Puff adventure playground, and the Alfie and Friends animal area. The two newest attractions are the Wilderness Walk and Fairy Dell.
“Fairytale Farm is a sensory and learning wonderland for families. So essentially, it’s a farm park with a difference,” says Laister. “It’s heavily fairytale-themed. There are lots of interactive things where you can press buttons and things happen. There are dancing fountains that are controlled by the visitor, and the Giants Camera, which will take a photograph of you and you can send it home.”
“We’ve got lots of things you can climb into and climb on. And of course, animals, which is a big part of Fairytale Farm. We have our animal area, which we call Alfie and Friends, which is named after our park mascot Alfie the Alpaca.
“Alfie found a bit of fame last year when he was predicting World Cup football results. He was on quite a few TV programs. But he wasn’t that accurate!” he laughs, “so he’s now been banished back to the paddock. He’s just an ordinary alpaca again.
An upcycled visitor attraction
“When we built Fairytale Farm I called it the ‘UK first upcycled visitor attraction’. Because literally, everything you saw came from other attractions – and to an extent we’re still doing that. For example, a lot of things we’ve taken out of other attractions that have been closed down or they’re removing things and we’ve repurposed them.”
“And so, even our new dinosaur area, which was repurposing dinosaurs taken out of the River Caves at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
“We re-sculpted them and added some movement to them. So one of the dinosaurs comes out to the pond and rises up out of the pond when people walk past it. It’s got bubbles first and then it comes up and sprays water over them.
“And so we’ve created movement in the dinosaurs and we’ve re-sculpted them so they’re friendlier. We made them colourful.”
Community engagement
Fairytale Farm has successfully engaged the local community in its sustainability projects. Laister explains:
“We took things to another level with our turkey shed which we decided to build out of eco-bricks. These are essentially plastic bottles stuffed full of crisp packet wrappers. So we have a turkey shed and a number of benches outside, all built out of these plastic bottles, so we’re doing our bit for finding another use for plastic.
“We’ve got big signs up so people can understand it. Hopefully, it will inspire other people to think the same about trying to find ways of reusing things. That really goes all the way through Fairytale Farm. The eco-bricks are probably the most obvious thing, but hidden away virtually everywhere you look is upcycling and repurposing.”
In May, the team launched the Wilderness Walk area. In contrast to the interactives, animated and animatronic features of other areas, the Wilderness Walk is completely non-electronic.
“We were planting that out with plants that are friendly to bees and butterflies. A local primary school came in that day and did the planting with us. We had a beekeeper there who was able to show them about bees while they were doing it. So they can understand the whole process of planting the seeds and the nectar and how it all works.
“We like to do things with the community with schools and also with special needs schools as well.”
Fairy Dell at Fairytale Farm
The newest addition to Fairytale Farm is the Fairy Dell. This area was opened by John L Broome CBE, the founder of Alton Towers Theme Park, on 17 June 2023.
“Fairy Dell was an area where it’s quite undulating with some big changes in levels. So we thought we would try and create an imaginary woodland glade, or fairy dell. And when you enter it, you feel like you’ve been shrunk to the size of fairies.”
Laister continues:
“We’ve got giant mushrooms, giant toadstools, lots of raised walkways, tunnels to climb through climbing walls, slides, and it’s all themed.
“So you’ve got huge blades of grass that are bigger than you, mushrooms are way bigger than you, they’re the height of a three-storey building. So everything’s larger than life in there to reflect the fact you’re shrunk. And what made Fairy Dell quite interesting is we wanted to, again, make it accessible so it’s completely bespoke, it’s not an off-the-shelf thing.
A bespoke design from CAP.Co
“We worked with CAP.Co to design and build it for us. We wanted to make it completely unique to Fairytale Farm and also as accessible as possible. You can actually get wheelchairs right up to the very last mushroom. We’ve got other sensory things that you can do along the way. And then in and around Fairy Dell, we’ve got various other things that will be of interest to people with differing disabilities.
“But again, it’s perfectly accessible and enjoyable for people without disabilities. You wouldn’t even notice if you were not disabled, you would just use it as per usual. So Fairy Dell stands for everything that we do at Fairytale Farm. Trying to make it inclusive and accessible but enjoyable by absolutely everybody.”
A farm park with a difference
Laister explains why he chose to work with CAP.Co for the new development:
“I’ve worked with CAP.Co in my other job as a consultant, on projects like Chobham Adventure Farm and the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu. I was just really impressed with everything they’ve done, they just seem to be much less off the shelf, if you can see what I mean. Much more about being unique and being designed and also the idea we wanted it to be immersive. Themed.”
“Again, this whole idea of a farm park with a difference. So if we do a big play area, an expensive play area, we’re going to theme that and make it fit in with our theme of fairytales. So we went literally this time it did fairies as opposed to fairy tales. We thought CAP.Co were the perfect people because what they do is completely bespoke and designed around you and your requirements. We were certainly not let down. We’re all very impressed. It’s been it’s only been open since the 27 May, and has been a great success with awesome, amazing feedback from it.”
Future developments
“We’ve always got things going on. So we’re building lots of new things. We’re going to be building another new play area in the next 12 months, plus, we’re going to add a new theatre building, which will have a mixture of automated animatronic shows that switch on every half an hour and also seasonal events in there, with actors as well.”
HPW Architects is designing the new theatre.
“We’re going to have new toilets and a new changing places facility with adult changing for our disabled visitors.”
Ongoing evolution of Fairytale Farm
“We’ve got lots of other lots of other projects planned. Every year we try and add two or three new attractions. So we’ve grown quite rapidly really if you look at our visitor numbers over the last 10 years, they’ve gone up every year except 2020 due to Covid. But even in 2020 our visitor numbers were the same as the previous year, we didn’t go down. So that suggests to me that had there been no Covid we would have gone up that year as well.”
“And we’re still relatively small. When we started, our first year, I think we did 12,000 visitors. Last year we did 50,000. This year we’re on target for around about 60,000 in 2023. So looking at where we are as of today we’re certainly going in the right direction but we don’t want to be huge. There’s probably a sweet spot for us at around 75,000 visitors. We think after that point we won’t be inclusive enough, it’ll be too crowded.
“We will look to try and keep growing for another couple of years, two or three years and then see what we do next.”
