Pocket Planet - a new London attraction

[AY Mod]

Pocket Planet to revitalise Oxford Street with million-plus visitor-per-year immersive experiential attraction

 

Leisure experience developer, Pocket Planet, is taking the proven concept of miniature worlds to the next level with a unique 30,000 square foot indoor immersive experience including 50 metres of frontage on Oxford 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.

 

 

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. 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”

 

 

About Pocket Planet

 

Pocket Planet is the leisure experience developer behind a unique new immersive experiential attraction for London. The attraction will open in Spring 2024 and 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.

 

Mark Vlassopulos, Chief Executive Officer

 

 

 

Mark has developed and produced lifestyle projects in Europe, Asia and the US – hotels, entertainment, leisure, media, and schools. He is passionate about “leisure” and tourism and has created and reviewed attractions globally – always seeking the “next big thing”, but always with a mission to match profitability with visitor satisfaction. As a partner in Leisure Resources Group (LRG), which maintained a diverse portfolio of leisure attractions and FECs, including Juliana’s – the world’s largest chain of nightclubs (180+ units in 40 markets), Mark created the legendary Juliana’s Tokyo, a multimedia-centric venue in Tokyo with annual revenue over £30m. Mark has developed in Europe, Asia, and the US. Mark is also a leader at Premier Mission, a multi-media production, event, and talent company.

 

Mark Brodermann, Chief Operations Officer

 

 

Mark served 8 years as an Officer in the British Army, including being Aide de Camp to the Chief of the General Staff, the professional head of the army. He then joined Whitbread where, as Retail Director, he was responsible for 170+ town centre pubs and bars with sales in excess of £65 million. Mark also created new town centre bar concepts, acquired great sites and opened highly successful units across the country. Mark's interest is to create workplaces where the staff are just as excited and rewarded as the customers they serve. Mark was the Executive Director at Priory Healthcare, responsible for 8 hospitals and COO of TMA Ltd., an international consultancy for Fortune 500 companies where he instigated new marketing strategies and achieved cost savings of 15% and profit growth of 60% over 2 years.

 

Note: Images are of other attractions.

[Bucoops]

Great idea - Oxford St is a shadow of its former self right now so no doubt a non-retail attraction will help - and I bet the rent is quite low for central London!

[AY Mod]

7 minutes ago, Bucoops said:

Great idea - Oxford St is a shadow of its former self right now so no doubt a non-retail attraction will help - and I bet the rent is quite low for central London!

 

There are revitalisation projects underway.

 

Pocket Planet will be at 500 Oxford Street shown on this corner, 200m from the exit of Marble Arch tube station.

 

[Joseph_Pestell]

23 minutes ago, Bucoops said:

Great idea - Oxford St is a shadow of its former self right now so no doubt a non-retail attraction will help - and I bet the rent is quite low for central London!

 

This is indeed good news.

 

A lot of reporting recently about Oxford St having become shabby recently. The south side of the street has been like that for about 50 years.

[MarkSG]

Looks interesting. This was first announced in 2020, with a target opening of 2021 (see RMweb passim), but presumably that fell by the wayside along with a lot of other Covid-affected projects. It's good to see that they've managed to get it back on track. 

[AY Mod]

Howard's had a catch up with the CEO and one of the modelmakers.

 

 

[Enterprisingwestern]

 

Might there be a spare corner or two for AIMREC?

 

Mike.