Leisure experience developer Pocket Planet announces today the details of a unique new immersive experiential attraction for London, set to attract over a million visitors per year and to support the revitalization of Oxford Street. According to 365 Retail Pocket Planet is building an innovative visitor and retail experience offering Londoners, visitors and tourists of all ages and nationalities affordable and inclusive access to an immersive journey, featuring small scale, but very large model landscapes of UK landmarks, London itself and a selection of scenes from around the world.
Pocket Planet will be a premier 30,000 square-foot experiential attraction, located at 500 Oxford Street, with a passing footfall of over 150 million per year. The attraction will feature some of the world’s largest and most entertaining miniature world models, augmented with moving planes, trains, vehicles, and boats. Utilising the latest cutting-edge audio-visual technologies, Pocket Planet will take miniature world model making to a whole new level, enhancing the physical models with audio and visual effects to offer a unique visitor experience.
“Our plan for Pocket Planet is for it to become the UK’s largest indoor miniature world and London’s favourite attraction,” says Mark Vlassopulos, CEO of Pocket Planet. “Our ambition is to create the best and most attractive million-plus visitation tourist attraction in the UK. The site we have is incredible: we have 30,000 square feet with 50 metres of frontage at 500 Oxford Street right between Marble Arch and Bond Street tube station. It is the tourism hotspot of the UK and Pocket Planet will be a special space – an attraction on the scale of something that London hasn’t seen before. It will be a visual delight, both for the models and the ground-breaking audio-visual elements.”
“Over the last five years we’ve looked at all the world’s leading miniature attractions, such as Small Worlds in Tokyo and Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg,” says Mark Brodermann, COO of Pocket Planet. “They’re all great, but Pocket Planet will go an extra level. The team we’ve put together draws on the best of breed in leisure interior design and some of the greatest modellers in the world. Oxford Street is expected to have up to 200 million pedestrians per year walking right past our door. As a high volume, but at an affordable ticket price, attraction, the miniature world concept works very well. It has a relatively low operating cost, but a very metronomic and steady flow of income from ticket sales.”
“This is a truly unique investment opportunity, because Pocket Planet has a prime, triple-A central London location at a highly affordable price,” says Charlie Peat, Head of Private Capital Markets at Peel Hunt. “With a number of key investors and strategic partners already in place, including Europe’s leading ticketing partner Eventim, and Event Merchandising, the Pocket Planet team are taking full advantage of an advantageous moment with fast recovering tourism and relatively affordable ret conditions on Europe’s busiest street”
Pocket Planet retail and café (10,000 sq. ft.) will open in Spring 2024 and the Pocket Planet exhibit will open in early 2025.
Publisher of Hospitality and Leisure News, 365 Retail, Retail Source and organiser of the Creative Retail Awards.
