Hyde Park Winter Wonderland and Magical Ice Kingdom

Every year, we go off to the Hyde Park Winter Wonderland event! Some years we go as a date night with just Dann and I, other years we take all three of our children to have a magical and festive time. This year, we took our kids. Winter Wonderland is a bit of an expensive place – especially as they now have a ticket price to get in, but if you do pre-book enough activities, this entry fee is waved and you are able to go in for free, technically. We ended up booking up tickets to Magical Ice Kingdom, which has always been apart of the event, however we had never gone to it!

Winter Wonderland has a bunch of different rides. The last three years, both us and our kids had actually skipped out on rides, as Robin wasn’t quite big enough for most of them. This year, however, they really wanted to do rides, so we did! Rides are extremely expensive at Winter Wonderland. We are talking like 6£ a go for some of them. We found the best value in the Fun Houses. There were quite a few fun houses which were massive, almost like two buildings. One, which had the theme of the fire house, when Amelia got off, she pointed to the other side of the fire house, and said “can we go on that one” before we explained that she just came off of that one, it’s all connected! These fun houses also took like 15 to 20 minutes for them to complete, which felt like great value.

There are also fairground games around, we did one of the games to try and win some Pokemon plushies, but they are really challenging and we didn’t end up coming close to winning at all, which was fine. The whole idea was just doing one, which was fun. Our primary focus at Winter Wonderland was actually to try lots of food – something all of the kids were onboard with. We had a bunch of loaded mac n cheese, different flavored fried chicken, hot chocolates, bubble tea, giant fried potatoes on a stick, loaded cookies – there is just so much fun food to try out! We did a lot of walking around, eating some food, and then walking around some more. There are a bunch of little shops which sell holiday ornaments, hats, and little gifts which are fun to look at, as well as many places that are well lit up and a lot of fun.

Our tickets to the Magical Ice Kingdom were timed, but we arrived early and were able to go in. This place, as you would imagine, was freezing. Absolutely cold! This area had a walk around a beautiful winter landscape with tons of ice sculptures, that told a story of a witch and a castle! These sculptures are so amazing, there was a lot of detail, some made of snow and some made of ice. The story was magical to go around, and felt really fun to explore and see. At the end of the Ice Kingdom, there is the option to go down an ice slide. Online, it said you needed to pay for this experience and pre-book it. There were no slots left for our time, but also no line, so we just went up and they weren’t checking tickets anyway. The ice slide isn’t as slippery as a normal slide, but was a fun end to the ice kingdom. We really enjoyed this experience and had never seen anything like it, which was super fun!

Hyde Park Winter Wonderland is a place where you are going to spend far too much money, but you’re also going to eat really fun food, see some really lovely lights, and if you have little ones, you can even visit Santa for free. It’s just a fun, wintertime experience that feels so nice to think back on!

You can check out our other Days Out to see what else we’ve been up too!