Blackgang Chine
Gnome bothering at Blackgang Chine. Ventnor, Isle of Wight (some point in the mid-1980s).
I’ve been pondering where my longstanding taste for the strange and slightly dark originated, and have come to the conclusion, prompted by this post by Tom Cox on Bluesky and my reply to it, that Blackgang Chine on the Isle of Wight, where I grew up, has a lot to answer for. This bizarre amusement park – the oldest in the country apparently, founded in 1843 – occupies a scenic coastal ravine on the south side of the island, and was without question my favourite childhood day out. It was aggressively zoned, Crystal Maze-style, with different areas styled as ‘lands’ and densely populated with replica buildings and props and life-sized fibreglass figures: Frontierland (which recreated the Wild West), Dinosaurland (a sort of discount Jurassic Park), Nurseryland (inspired by fairy tales), and so on. As the authors of Bollocks to Alton Towers accurately put it, it’s ‘what Disneyland might have looked like had the blueprints been drawn up by Enid Blyton’. Hedge mazes, model villages, halls of mirrors, chimney pot walks, an impressive gnome collection, and a ‘crooked house’ that was a missold haunted house complemented the themed tableaus. Precariously situated on a soft cretaceous cliff, it was also quite literally falling into the sea; large portions of the property were invariably cordoned off in response to the latest landslip, which only added to the sense of danger, intrigue, and excitement. Despite the encroachments of erosion, it is miraculously still operating.
