Alton Towers Bans High Heels On Children
12:16am UK, Saturday May 23, 2009
Theme park Alton Towers has banned children from wearing high heels after a string of audacious bids to cheat their way onto height-restricted rides.
Corkscrew roller coaster ride at Alton Towers
Shoe should be so lucky: New scanners will stop kids cheating height restrictions
The theme park is also introducing airport-style scanners for some of its more extreme rides ahead of half-term week.
The moves follow ingenious attempts by children to trick their way onto roller-coaster rides, which have 1.2m and 1.4m height restrictions.
Park bosses have revealed that youngsters are increasingly wearing high heels to get onto rides, as well as multiple pairs of socks.
Some have resorted to filling their shoes with objects while one vertically-challenged youngster even attached a pair of flip-flops to his trainers with masking tape.
Another child – a young girl – appeared to have swapped shoes with her mother in order to make the height restriction.
Ride at Alton Towers
Height fun: Oblivion ride
From Saturday, May 23, high-heels of more than an inch will be banned.
Alton Towers is also planning to buy shoe X-ray scanners similar to those now used in airports across the UK.
They will be deployed on some the park’s bigger rides such as Oblivion and Nemesis.
Morwenna Angove, the resort’s Sales and Marketing Director, said: “Of course we understand the children’s disappointment when they are too short to ride.
“But we’ve had to introduce these measures because they were coming up with some intriguing ways of trying to defy the height restrictions.
“Whilst this ban may appear extreme, we are confident it will reduce the number of desperate attempts to gain a centimetre or two.”
