The Ice Cream Farm is named as one of the UK’s Most Visited Attractions #Blog

Briony Wilson
4th August 2017

The Ice Cream Farm, based just outside Chester, has been named as one of the UK’s most visited free to enter attraction in Visit England’s Annual Survey report, ranking alongside the likes of the British Museum, Tate Modern and National Portrait Gallery.

The survey, which is carried out through a mix of interviewing methods, placed The Ice Cream Farm as the UK’s 19^th most visited free to enter attraction with over 800,000 visitors entering the ice cream haven in 2016. Home to The World’s Largest Ice Cream Shop and an array of ice cream themed family entertainment, The Ice Cream Farm is the only tourist attraction of its kind in the UK.

Jonathan Fell, Director of The Ice Cream Farm comments: “We recently celebrated over 30 years in business, which is something we’re immensely proud of. From our humble beginnings, we could never have imagined we would be ranked above some of the most well-known attractions across the country and what is truly rewarding is that we are a family entertainment attraction unlike many of the others listed in the survey, making us completely unique.”

The Ice Cream Farm began when forward-thinking dairy farmers, the Fell family, saw diversification opportunities for their dairy farm in the mid 1980’s and since then have been creating award-winning Cheshire Farm Ice Cream for over 30 years.

With growing numbers, The Ice Cream Farm tourist attraction reached capacity in 2013 and Jonathan saw further opportunity to improve and develop The Ice Cream Farm into a unique brand and one of the must-see tourist attractions in the region, as well as nationwide.

A £5million redevelopment was undertaken in 2014/15 and opening its doors in July 2015, The Ice Cream Farm now offers an amazing flavour of activity. From ‘Strawberry Falls’ adventure golf, ‘Scoop JCB diggers’ and ‘Honeycomb Canyon’, a sensational sand and water play area, to ‘Daisy’s Garden’, a free play experience with a difference that includes a snow-emitting, life-size magical ice cream tree sitting at the heart of the mind-blowing site.

Guinness World Records awarded record-breaking status to The Ice Cream Farm in 2016, an amazing achievement for the privately owned and thriving Cheshire business. The Parlour, as the record breaking shop is known, stocks a huge range of multi award-winning ice creams and sorbets and a whopping 118,000 ice creams were sold in August 2016 alone.

Having conducted in-depth customer surveys and taking note of industry trends across the years, The Ice Cream Farm places a huge amount of importance on ensuring the website is of the highest standard. This year they incorporated a ‘Visitor Monitor’ to enable customers to see how busy the attraction may be before they visit.  Visitors are also able to buy innovative ‘Play Pass’ discount cards and book plays in advance through the interactive website. At The Ice Cream Farm visitors are able to decide their own budget, from a VIP Play Pass experience to just calling in for an ice cream, they don’t even have to spend a penny if they don’t want to.