Winter Wonderland is a Christmas-themed playground that lands on the sorry part of Hyde Park in November; the part that is munched underfoot, and is sad, and makes money. It sucks up children and spits them out fatter and closer to death, but happy — at least that is what their parents say. The children themselves look drugged, or frightened, because their parents are invariably screaming at them. From the north, Wonderland looks like Coney Island, a cold, bleak fairground from Scooby Doo, with seagulls screaming and circling, far more than is usual for central London. That is when I begin to mistrust Wonderland. We are here for the same thing, these critic gulls and I: the food.
There is food in Wonderland; piles of food, most of it fake, or ersatz, or pretend food. There are shacks and huts and pubs and outlets; there is also an ice rink, a circus, a fairground, an ice kingdom, and Santa sweating obesely in his grotto; then there are the shops, selling every form of tat known to child. Wonderland has done that very modern thing of sacrificing charm to choice, like Jeremy Hunt. (Happy Christmas, Jeremy Hunt; why don’t you hand over, I mean sell, the entire NHS catering provision to Wonderland? Oh, you have? Burp.)
And so every possible Christmas experience, theme, idea, memory or possibility has been squelched into a patch of sorry grass, and the result is incredibly disorientating and anxious-making; my visit here is one long panic attack. If this were Disney World, Florida, the monster on which Wonderland is modelled, it would be slightly cleaner and better signposted, and there would be more fat people in motorised wheelchairs driving about shouting and looking for food, and the weather would be better; but this is England, where every place entirely dedicated to pleasure is faintly despairing or guilt-ridden, even if Bing Crosby is singing ‘I’m Dreaming of a Fat Christmas with Every Bagel that I Mindlessly Eat’.
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