Alton towers has probably the most interesting history of any theme park as its iconic stately home and gardens have been operating as a tourist attraction since the mid to late 1800s and there has been some form of amusement park on the site since the 1960s. The park as we now know it opened in 1981 with the opening of Corkscrew (which remained at the park until 2008 to make way for Secret Weapon 6, now known as Thirteen). The park was purchased in the early 90s by Tussuads who built three of the park’s most iconic rides an inverted coaster called Nemesis, a dive coaster called Oblivion and a flying coaster originally called Air that was rethemed to Galactica in 2016. They also introduced the Secret Weapon codename for the parks major coasters: SW3 was Nemesis with the two latest being SW7 which was the Smiler and SW8 which opened in 2018 under the name Wicker Man. The park was passed around a couple of times before being purchased by Merlin entertainments in 2007 for £1 billion. Merlin also brought back the parks brand identity by bringing back the parks theme music ‘In the hall of the mountain king’ and the Secret weapon codename. All seemed to be going well until in 2014 when during the summer season the Smiler had such a long queue that all of the rides trains had to be running and one stopped part way through the ride’s track and the staff ignored the safety warning the ride computer was sending to them and they sent a full train out which ended up crashing into the train that stalled several injuring four riders but the park have perfectly rebounded they opened CBeebies land in 2015 which includes rides based on the characters Postman Pat, Elmo and Cookie monster and most recently Peter Rabbit. They also opened Wicker man last year which is a family coaster which is themed to being “sacrificed” to a pagan god called the Wicker man and not the Nicholas Cage movie.