Could Battersea Power Station become a leisure park dedicated to extreme sports, with restaurants, hotels and retailing? Of the few incarnations mooted for the old 1930s’ central London landmark, a leisure park is, given its vast, open interior, the most favoured.
The Extreme Group, a company known for its merchandising of all things connected to extreme sports – it has its own dedicated Extreme Sports Channel – is yet another company that dreams of creating just such a park.
Sitting in Extreme’s offices – a converted church just off London’s Edgware Road – chief executive Al Gosling is enthusiastically outlining his views on the firm’s plans for Extreme parks.
Joining the conversation on speaker phone from Baltimore in the US is British-born designer Roy Higgs, CEO of Development Design Group, the planning, architecture and design company that has joined forces with Extreme to develop the ambitious leisure parks concept.
Extreme and DDG want to see their projects “expand across all continents to anchor retail malls and mixed-use and entertainment developments with a range of ‘Extreme’ facilities, including skateboarding, climbing walls and surf waves”. Their partnership, which is targeting the Middle East, the US, South East Asia, Europe and India, is “already negotiating two projects in the US and Middle East” (see panel).
Extreme and DDG – which develops mixed-use schemes mainly in the US – will, they add, “leverage their collective experience, creative talents and lifestyle brand positioning to develop global theme parks” that will include “attractions, retail, hotels and restaurants”.
The parks will be new-build or conversions of existing developments. Gosling rules nothing out.
While Battersea Power Station is, as yet, be a pipe dream, Gosling and Higgs are serious about opening the parks – even during a depths of an economic downturn.
With more Britons looking to holiday at home because of the weak sterling, Gosling and Higgs feel that the timing could not be better for them. “The recession is almost helping us because people are looking for something different,” says Gosling.
The Extreme/DDG joint venture will join forces with other developers to build the parks, which will vary in size from what Gosling describes as “small” up to around 100 acres.
These developers can, says Gosling, be large, small or niche, as long they are prepared to back the schemes financially.
Confidently, he says: “We have different deals going on with different partners but what we are doing is bringing the brand, the merchandise, the hotel and clothing label to the table.
“What the developer will do is pay for the development, and then the park will be pay-per-play, or free.”
The ideas for Extreme and DDG’s “leisuretainment experiences” are in place, but so far no opening dates have been confirmed, or indeed, when development will begin.
Both Gosling and Higgs give reassurances that they will start development, although not necessarily in the UK, very soon.
Gosling says: “I am 90% sure that we will see a park go live somewhere in Eastern Europe by mid-2011.” He predicts that in the coming decade the Extreme Group will have up to 10 parks located across several continents.
But what about the jv’s plans for the UK? Higgs responds: “The type of projects we are looking at are not going to be built this year. They will take some time to evolve. It’s the whole story about building a brand – it takes time. We are looking at the long term.”
Gosling adds that nothing similar is on offer. “This is totally ground-breaking stuff. There is no prototype – we will be going straight in.”
But two crucial questions remain: does the country need another theme park? And, how different will the Extreme/DDG version be to the likes of PY Gerbeau’s three Xscape snow schemes in Milton Keynes, Leeds and Glasgow?
Gosling’s answer to the first question is a firm “yes”. “We are bringing something that gives a development or project a point of difference,” he adds.
In answer to the second, Gosling springs to the defence of his brand, pointing out that there is little similarity between Extreme Parks and Xscape this is despite the fact that Gerbeau is planning a major extension to Xscape MK, which will include attractions similar to the Extreme vision, such as hotels and restaurants.
More than just skiing
“What Xscape has at the moment is just snow domes, but our offer is more than just about skiing,” says Gosling. “Comparing us with snow domes is like comparing apples with oranges.”
So how does the market react to Gosling’s and Higgs’s grand plans?
One analyst says that putting in activities such as climbing walls “are fine because their costs are 3/-6d, and the same goes for skateboards, although I would describe doing this as brave because skateboarding sites are usually council-owned. Nobody has commercially exploited this before.
“So, if you are avoiding making it all snow and concentrating on the dry stuff, which is low capital expenditure, then it could work.”
However, on the negative side, the analyst adds: “I would say that they face an uphill challenge, especially as they want to build these parks at malls, because there isn’t that much of an overlap – apart from the car park. We see these types of schemes now and again and they don’t happen if I were a betting man I wouldn’t bet on these doing so.”
Gosling and Higgs are, however, betting men – as Gosling has proved by the risks he has taken setting up a multitude of Extreme brands, and as DDG has proved with its schemes.
They see a future for Extreme parks in the UK, and they expect to be making an announcement on their jv plans soon.
An Extreme history
Dubbed “the young Richard Branson” for his entrepreneurial aspirations and brand diversification, Al Gosling set up Extreme Entertainment – then called Extreme International – in 1995 at the age of 24.
His goal was to establish the world’s leading extreme sports television company.
Extreme started broadcasting to 400,000 viewers from Amsterdam on 1 May 1999. It now broadcasts – in 12 languages – to more than 38m homes across 60 countries.
In 2006 the Extreme Group announced that it was planning to build a 3.5m sq ft Ex Park in Dubai. In November the same year it launched three online businesses and Extreme Hotels.
Extreme’s first hotel opened in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2007 after the company teamed up with Istithmar Hotels, a leading hotel investment and asset management firm, and Protea Hotels, Africa’s premier operator, to secure initial funding for the £200m project.
The 130-bedroom SA hotel features a five-storey climbing wall on the side of the building, a gourmet burger bar, pool deck and swimming pool.
There are now 17 Extreme hotels in the pipeline, of which up to 10 will be open in the UK by 2014. The group’s brands also include travel shop Ex Travel, and new clothing label Ex Raw State. These will be sold in Ex Stores, the first of which will open in Guildford at the end of this month.
