The American Adventure Theme Park
— — the quiet that came after the rides stopped.
Not only on a wall.
“An American-themed park that opened in 1987 on a reclaimed colliery site at Shipley Country Park, halfway between Nottingham and Derby. There was a wooden coaster called the Missile, a log flume through a saloon town, a paddle steamer on the lake. It closed in 2007 and the rides were broken up; the lake and the woods are still there, walked now by dog-owners and birders. The tile remembers the place the way an old postcard does.
The American Adventure Theme Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The American Adventure occupied roughly 110 acres on the western edge of Shipley Country Park in Derbyshire, between Ilkeston and Heanor. The land had been opencast coal workings until the 1970s, reclaimed by the county council and given over to a leisure use in 1985. Granada owned the park at opening in 1987; ownership passed through Pearson and Venture World Holdings before closure on 2 November 2007. The site sat on the route of the old Nottingham Canal, with the central lake formed from a flooded clay pit serving the long-gone Shipley pottery.
The park ran a twenty-year season from Easter 1987 to autumn 2007. The headline rides arrived in waves: the Missile steel coaster in 1988, the Runaway Train in 1992, the Skycoaster in 1998, the Nightmare Niagara triple-drop flume in 2000. Annual attendance peaked above half a million in the mid-1990s before drifting down against Alton Towers and Drayton Manor an hour away. The closure announcement came in February 2007 and the gates shut that November, with rides sold to parks in Mexico, Italy, and the Netherlands over the following two years.
What stands now is woodland, the lake, and a few concrete pads where ride footings used to be. Shipley Country Park reabsorbed the land after demolition finished in 2009, and the area is walked daily by people from Ilkeston, Heanor, and the villages along the Erewash. The American Adventure railway trackbed makes a quiet circular path of about two miles. Coots nest on the lake. The tile is not of the rides; it is of the place the rides were on, before and after, which is still there.