Center Parcs Longleat – a stealth socialist utopia on Lord Bath’s estate

Center Parcs Longleat is a holiday village in a forest in Wiltshire, on Lord Bath’s estate, so you can never be entirely sure that you will not see a man dressed as a wizard having sex up against a tree. I thought it would be a fake forest, like the pines you see wilting from the M25, but it is a proper forest, with shrubs, deer, puddles and lakes. But for the looming presence of Center Parcs, which operates five ‘villages’ in England as emergency respite care for people with young children, it would be paradise.

The centrepiece — the altar — is the ‘subtropical swimming paradise’ which floats, like a large watery spider, in the centre of the parc. (I do not know why it is spelled like that.) It is wrapped in a mall, which sells goods for 30 per cent more than in the world beyond Center Parcs Longleat.