High Court orders company behind £3.5bn theme park project to close

Plans to build Europe’s biggest theme park on the outskirts of London have come to a definitive end after the High Court ordered the company behind the £3.5bn scheme to be wound up.

The London Resort, described as the UK’s version of Disneyland, was first proposed almost 14 years ago and was due to open this year at a site on the Swanscombe Peninsula between Dartford and Gravesend.

The future of the 465ha park, which was forecast to attract 12 million visitors a year, has been in doubt since its developer London Resort Company Holdings went into administration in March 2023.

A High Court judge has now ordered the company to close following an application by Paramount, the scheme’s original backer, which said it is owed £13.5m.

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Insolvency and Companies Court Judge Sally Barber found the company has ceased trading and “appears unlikely ever to do so again”.

The ruling caps a rocky few years for the park which started with Paramount Pictures’ decision to pull out of the project in 2017. 

A planning application was then withdrawn in 2022 following concerns raised by Natural England, which said the scheme’s former industrial site provided “ideal conditions for a unique variety of wildlife,” including one of the UK’s rarest spiders.

The company’s chief executive, French businessman Pierre-Yves Gerbeau – best known in this country as being appointed 25 years ago the chief executive of the New Millennium Experience Company the operator of the Millennium Dime – and its chairman, former Conservative transport minister Steven Norris, both subsequently stepped down and were not replaced.

Although plans were announced to scale back the project, it suffered another blow when its main backer, Kuwaiti businessman Abdulla al-Humaidi, declared bankruptcy in 2023.

Al-Humaidi, who claimed to have put £40m into the venture, described the UK’s planning system last year as “broken” and said it needed to be “streamlined”.

The theme park was intended to include partnerships with Paramount, the BBC and ITV to create experiences based on films including Mission Impossible, Dr Who, Top Gear, and Paddington.

It would have been a major rival to another theme park mega-project, a UK outpost of Universal Studios currently proposed for a 476 acre plot in Bedfordshire.

Plans for the park, unveiled last year, have been backed by several local authorities and would be approved directly by the government through a development consent order.