‘It’s like Vegas for kids’

Alton Towers’ CBeebies Land Hotel is designed with toddlers in mind, but can adults endure the bright colours, characters and fun music? Hattie Garlick tries it for a night

Check your cynicism, taste and, in fact, entire rational brain at the door. There’s no place for them where you are headed. Today, Alton Towers is opening the doors of CBeebies Land Hotel – a 76-room creation that is entirely themed around the BBC’s television channel for pre-schoolers and its most popular characters. And I really do mean, entirely.

From the lobby with its fake parade of primary coloured shop fronts and a toddler-sized tunnel, to the themed rooms, decorated so that children can effectively sleep inside their favourite cartoon show... like it or loathe it, this hotel will be at top of toddlers’ birthday lists for some time.

Ironically, it was actually my birthday when I checked in with my three-year-old daughter for the night, just before its official opening. I was not entirely convinced this was how I would have chosen to mark the occasion, particularly with prices starting at £177 a night for a standard room, rising to £327 for a themed suite.

When I canvassed other parents, responses to this ranged from the outraged (“That’s how much we spent on a week’s camping for seven!”) to the gleeful (“This is one of the best things about having kids, being able to do all the cheesy silly stuff again”).

I was aiming for the latter outlook, and had decided to book us into The Octonauts- themed room. You know The Octonauts, right? It’s that cartoon where a one-eyed kitten, a rabbit the colour of seasickness and an abomination called Tunip, who appears to be a vegetable-vermin hybrid, cruise about in a deep sea vessel saving stricken crustaceans. I reasoned that the oceanic colour palate might have a Hattie Garlick and her daughter, Frida, left, enjoyed a night in a room themed after ‘The Octonauts’, above; the bright lights of the hotel lobby, top right more soporific effect on my daughter than the other extra-special themed rooms – Postman Pat (pillows like giant letters and Jess the cat disappearing through a cat flap in the door), Something Special (your chance for a sleepover at Mr Tumble’s house), In the Night Garden (sleep in Igglepiggle’s boat!), Swashbuckle (on the deck of a pirate ship, with a treasure map bedspread) – or the 42 standard Bugbie rooms (rainbows on the walls, meadows on the carpets, yellow Martians hiding all over the place).

I was, of course, wrong. There was a short moment, on entering the lobby, when she was immobilised by excitement. Then she transformed into a tiny, plump tornado.

If you are three, it turns out, there is literally nothing more exciting than a man dressed in a Postman Pat fat suit, handing out high fives. Then there was the “musical meadow” – an entertainment space in which 14 hours of live shows happen every day, courtesy of the staff and a huge interactive screen.

You could lose all sense of time and perspective in here. It’s like Vegas for kids. With – brilliant idea, this – a bar at the back for parents to retreat to.

Luckily, there is plenty of opportunity to run off your children’s delirium. A quick monorail trip finds you at CBeebies Land itself, which opened within Alton Towers last year, with rides and attractions all aimed at pre-schoolers.

At worst, it’s a very sweet and gentle introduction to the basic futility of theme parks: queuing for 20 minutes for a two-minute ride. At best, however, it’s almost reminiscent of Stockholm’s Junibacken attraction, in which the worlds of Astrid Lindgren’s books ( Pippi Longstocking et al) are re-created for kids to clamber through.

There are live shows featuring beloved characters. You can explore inside Charlie and Lola’s home on Crocodile Street, climb a Mount Fuji of mashed potato and gather “green drops” as if you’ve stepped into the pages of I Will Not Ever Eat a Tomato. There’s a sensory garden and – this being a BBC project – a café conspicuously low on the usual sugary horrors, with an old-school fruit and veg bar instead.

Back at the hotel we returned to our room. Oceanic theme or not, it was still an insult to interior design. But having practised seeing through the eyes of a three year-old, I could appreciate that it was also ludicrously fun.

Puddles, pirate maps and starfish were printed into our carpet. There were brightly coloured control panels, giant red buttons and anchors where they had no business to be.

Frida scaled a bunk bed done up like an Octopod and we bellowed instructions at one another across the room: “Quick! There’s a short-sighted Essentials CBeebies Land Hotel (altontowers. com/shortbreaks/cbeebiesland-hotel), Alton Towers, Farley Ln, Alton, Stoke-on-Trent. Standard Bugbie-themed rooms from £177, themed rooms from £252, themed suites from £327, based on four sharing (rooms) or seven sharing (suites) and including breakfast. Theme park tickets aren’t included, but guests have two days’ access for the price of one, free parking and entry to the park one hour before the general public.

crab with a dodgy claw who needs our help!”

More pragmatically, in the bathroom there was a toddler seat on the loo as well as a little step and children’s shampoo. In the bedroom, there was a bottle warmer and – bliss – blackout curtains. Plus, each room is divided in two – a kids’ area with bunks and a wall of little games, and a separate space with a double bed.

Still in the guise of two Octonauts, we swam down the stairs to the restaurant which, much like everything else, is... extremely bright. And fun. There’s a giant windmill with rotating blades for a salad bar. You can’t linger in there for too long, as the music would make your ears bleed. But that’s OK, because everyone is there with a toddler: lingering is out anyway.

One nice thing is that they don’t have a separate kids’ menu, each dish just comes in different sizes. Some of them have 10 different vegetables hidden in them. But let’s be honest, you’re not here for the food.

You’re here, as I was, for the kids. For the way they look so overwhelmed that their chubby cheeks might explode when Captain Barnacles and Kwazi come out from behind a curtain to lead Octonauts Cadet Camp after supper.

Frida now thinks I am “the funnest mum”. Which, actually, is probably one of the best birthday presents I could have asked for.