Riders with their arms in the air on a rollercoaster that hangs below its track

Riders on the Vampire, Chessington’s hanging rollercoaster.

OK, so Chessington is a theme park, and it’s a good one.

There’s basically three things to see/do:

  • Rides.
  • Zoo.
  • Aquarium.

There’s a bunch of free shows - some of which are pretty good, some not so much - but you do have to be in the right place at the right time, so check what’s on for the day that you visit.

NB Chessington is closed most weekdays in the winter! Check dates with their website.

A baby gorilla on all fours in a bed of straw, with bits of straw in its furMbula as a baby, in the straw.

Getting there

Chessington is in the outskirts of London, in other words it’s out in suburbia (fair enough, there’s not really enough room for a theme park in the middle of town). But it’s not hard to get to and it doesn’t take long - this is the kind of journey that many London commuters do twice each day without really thinking about it at all.

  1. Go to Waterloo railway station. Get there by tube or bus.
  2. Tap in at the barriers with a contactless bank card or an Oyster card (or buy a ticket from a machine or the ticket office) and get on a train to Chessington South. They leave every half hour, at 17 and 47 minutes past the hour, usually from one of Waterloo’s low-numbered platforms (most often platform 4, but check the departure boards). On Sundays it’s 21 and 51 minutes past the hour, usually from platform 5. The train takes about 35 minutes.
  3. Turn right out of Chessington South station, then left on the main road. It’s about 10 minutes walk and it’s well-signposted.

If you’re stuck/confused, use the Transport for London Journey Planner. Type ‘Chessington World of Adventures’ in the ‘To’ box and pick it from the suggestions. Then it’ll give you a personalised route from whatever your starting-place is.

Tickets and prices

So Chessington has an interesting pricing policy, which is that if you turn up at the front gate and just buy some tickets on the spot then they’ll charge you the earth (i.e. charge you a lot), but if you plan ahead and get a discount of some kind - there’s a bunch of different ones available - then you can save 50% or more on the entry price. So a family can easily save £50 or more with some of the special offers - it’s worth the effort.

Offers which might be useful to you:

  • Booking in advance on the Chessington website.
  • A third off the online price, for up to six people, when you come by train. Beware though, you have to get a code from the special-offer website and book online by 11pm the night before, and show a paper or e-ticket for the train at the gate. Tapping in with Oyster or a contactless card doesn’t count.
  • Adult and pre-schooler tickets: £29 for one adult and one child aged 4 or under, Monday to Friday in term time.
  • Tesco Clubcard vouchers are worth double on a Merlin Annual Pass, which gets you into Chessington and lots of other attractions all year, or on day tickets booked in advance.
  • A Chessington Annual Pass costs £64 a person.
  • Cadbury chocolate and biscuit packs marked ‘Who will you take?’ have a code for 10% to 50% off up to four online tickets, until 30 June 2027. The discount is biggest on quiet term-time weekdays. You have to book by 11pm the night before, and you can’t use it with the train offer.
  • If someone in your family is disabled, their carer gets in free. Book the paid tickets online as usual, then pick up the carer ticket at the ticket office, bringing proof such as a DLA or PIP letter or a Blue Badge, plus photo ID for the disabled person named on it. The carer must be over 14. If queuing is hard, apply for a free Ride Access Pass well before you go.

A yellow rollercoaster car painted with red flames, tilted on its track with riders inside

Riders on Dragon’s Fury, the rollercoaster with spinning cars.

So - once you’re in, what is there to do?

Rides

Children in small wooden boats with white sails going round a ride, some of them with their arms in the air

Seastorm’s boats mid-ride.

Two adults and three young children sitting in a row on a log-shaped seat high up a cartoon tree trunk, two of the children waving

A family on Treetop Hoppers, then called Jungle Bouncers.

A small pirate ship ride with wooden-log seats tipped up at an angle, full of children and parents, some of them waving

Griffin’s Galleon mid-swing.

There’s thrill rides (adults and older children) and there’s kiddie rides. All the rides are included in the entry price, but queues for the more popular ones can be long, particularly Dragon’s Fury, the Vampire and the new PAW Patrol rides.

So long as your child is at least 90cm tall, they’ll be able to go on the kiddie rides - which there are quite a lot of, and they’re really good. Lots of them have no minimum height at all, so even toddlers under 90cm can ride with someone aged 16 or over: try the Gruffalo River Ride Adventure, Room on the Broom, Elmer’s Flying Jumbos, Sea Dragons and the Adventure Tree Carousel. It’s actually really surprising how much there is at Chessington that’s suitable for small people.

Particular favourites of our kids are:

  • Seastorm (Shipwreck Coast) - fairground ride with boats that go round and up/down. Seems like the ideal level of excitement for a 3 or 4 year old.
  • Treetop Hoppers (The Rainforest) - up! down! up up up! down down down! up down!
  • Griffin’s Galleon (Land of the Dragons) - mini-Pirate Ship.

All three need children to be at least 90cm tall. Under 1.1m (1.2m on Griffin’s Galleon), a child rides with someone aged 16 or over.

and there’s loads more.

New in 2026: the PAW Patrol section. The newest thrill ride is Mandrill Mayhem, a fast rollercoaster that goes upside down (opened 2023, 1.2m minimum). Minecraft World is due to open in 2027.

The main thrill rides are the Vampire (hanging rollercoaster - old but ok) and Dragon’s Fury (rollercoaster that spins you round as you go along the track - Ms L reports strong feelings of nausea). If you’re with kids too small for the big rides, pick up a free ‘Parent Swap Pass’ from Guest Help and Information (by the ‘Mane Stage’) when you arrive. One parent queues and rides while the other looks after the kids, then you swap over and the second parent uses the shorter Fastrack queue.

Zoo

OK, so there’s been a zoo here since 1931 - nearly 100 years. Thankfully it’s been thoroughly redeveloped and the days of the polar bear pacing back and forth in his tiny cage are pretty much over.

They’ve got all the standard animals you’d expect (no polar bear any more, which is probably a good thing) and some rare ones which they try to preserve and breed. Likewise there’s no elephants, which is good.

At set times there’s a sealion talk or display at Sea Lion Bay (see below) - check the Chessington app for times on the day.

The two Asiatic lions and the Amur tiger moved to Jimmy’s Farm & Wildlife Park in Suffolk in October 2025, to give them more room. The Land of the Tiger is still called that, and its log flume is still Tiger Rock, so warn your kids there are no tigers in it. The only wild cat left is the serval, a spotty, long-legged cat from Africa, in the Trail of the Kings.

The gorillas are great, and the enclosure is made so that you can get up quite close to them and see them through big windows. Mbula, the baby gorilla in the photo above, is a teenager now, but the youngest in the troop, Kipande and Aarde, are super-cute. The way they look and the way they move and play is so nearly-human that it’s hard not to feel sorry for them, living in a cage.

There’s a walk-through, AMAZU Treetop Adventure, where trails and raised walkways take you through and above enclosures of birds and very small cute rare monkeys. It’s queue-free, though there may be a short wait while staff limit numbers, and it has play areas and a slide too.

A smiling keeper crouched on rocks, holding a fish out to a sealion in the waterA keeper hand-feeds a sealion at the edge of its pool.

Shows

  • Sealion Show: a good one. Sealions doing tricks. Lots of fun and even slightly educational. The sealions look like they’re enjoying themselves, probably because they get fish as part of the deal.
  • Ray Talk and Feed: when we went, this was where they fed the rays in the aquarium. Vaguely disappointing. The rays did get fed but there wasn’t much of a talk - the guy didn’t seem to know all that much about them. Missed the opportunity to ask him if he was called Ray.
  • Animal Antics: small animals (rodents, birds) that have been trained to do tricks. Definitely fun.

An orange and white striped clownfish swimming beside a sea anemone

A clownfish next to a sea anemone.

Aquarium

Pretty much the same as the other ‘Sea Life’ branded aquariums (e.g. in Brighton or at London County Hall). Plenty of pretty fishes, seahorses etc. Would be more interesting if we were able to spend some more time in it actually reading the signs and finding out about the marine life, but with small children that’s not really much of an option - and they’re not super-impressed by the fishes after the first 10 minutes.

There’s a big tank with a walk-through tunnel, so you can see the fishes from sort-of ‘inside’ the tank, which is kind of cool. They have sharks in the tunnel too, from small California horn sharks (about 1m long) to blacktip reef sharks and a zebra shark, which grow to about 1.6m and 2.5m. They’re definitely worth seeing.

Allow about half an hour. Better to go to this aquarium, here at Chessington where there’s lots of other things to do as well, than to spend the entrance fee at the London Aquarium and then be out half an hour later.

The aquarium is always nice and cool, so can be a good refuge from the sun on very hot days at Chessington - elsewhere there’s a lot of asphalt and not a lot of shade.

So in summary:

  • It’s worth going to Chessington, there’s a lot to see.
  • It’s worth the entrance fee so long as you get one of the special offers/deals.
  • Take a day out from central London, brave the journey and make the kids happy.
  • If you have the time in your schedule, consider coming back another day to finish seeing it all.

A baby meerkat sitting in a person's cupped handsA baby meerkat held in cupped hands.

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