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. But since you cannot drive in Center Parcs Longleat, or ‘parc’ your car by your ‘villa’, there is, for 21st-century people, no world beyond Center Parcs Longleat. Once inside, there is no outside. It is as complete and consuming as a novel.
The ‘subtropical swimming paradise’ is a series of pools, flumes and slides arranged by a jaunty café selling toasties and sodas; you can, for novelty, get into a large box in the changing rooms, which will dry your flabby body, or you can jump down a hole. It is a reasonably successful attempt to establish Barbados near Warminster and I like it, although I am surprised, due to the volume of hobbity folk wading waist-high through the pools, there are not more drownings. Almost everyone in the ‘subtropical swimming paradise’ is under ten, or fat, although gaggles of childless youth are also present, presumably to get drunk before jumping down holes, which is, to my mind, an act of political subversion.
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