Dreamland

This is not a “Call of Cthulhu” reference, for all you fans out there. It is a reference to Dreamland park in Margate!  There you are another place that you can take the kids  to (If you live in Margate), but why bring this up to you now?  This is a publicly funded body which has had a lot of publicly funded money to it.  This means it is of interest to us because it is using OUR money.  The thing is that it is also a business.  How does this business get public money?

A big thanks you goes to Louise Oldfield - Who runs a blog called Margate Architecture and  http://louiseoldfield.com/.  If you look at her FoI Requests she has done a lot of work on this issue and has brought up a lot of information on Dreamland.  So what has been dug up about the issue?  So, let's have a look at some of the tendering processes.  Firstly, dreamland has a historic railway and needs to be updated.  WHat did the council say about who is responsible? The council's response is here.  There does seem to be another issue regarding the trains because another FoI request was sent in about this issue, which has yet to be answered at the time of writing.

So What else has been dug up?  Louise has dug up Heritage Lottery funding decisions, correspondence between the council and the Heritage lottery, renewal minutes, other meeting minutes.  This is a whole lot of information that is based upon a theme park and a lot of work to show what is happening on the inside of the council. So the question is, how does this affect us and what can we learn from this?  

How many other places in Wales are actually run by The Welsh Government OR a Welsh Council?  Tourism is a big business as Conway Council shows us, and public funding does help to bring it is (The Welsh Government awarded Aberdaron £17.5m in 2011). So what plans does the Welsh Government have for bringing in tourism. A little look through the pile found that the Welsh Government spent a lot of money on a flower festival (again sent in 2011)

So I sent the Welsh Government a little request asking about tourism in Wales.  The thing that strikes me is how little tourism is looked at in Wales.  There are people who look into it , such as the people who are looking into Zip World.(it is written in Welsh but  there annotations made on it). Also when I asked British Tourist Authority how much money they spent on Wales, they had not answered me (At time of writing).  The thing is, People have an interest in tourism. People want to see what is going on with  their area. (Check out this from Cardiff).

Tourism is a good way of regeneration.  So why are more people not looking into this. I wonder what happens if we look under more rocks...