“Something incredibly precious is the wonder of a child.”
Looking back at last year’s hugely anticipated opening of Lapland Manchester, co-founder Michael Battle can’t help but be drawn to what – or who – it’s all for.
“A child of belief is not something trivial or disposable,” he says. “It is something valuable – entrusted to us for a very short few years.”
Over the course of the past two decades, Michael and wife Alison have built Lapland UK into the most popular festive family attraction in the country.
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At their original site in Ascot just outside of London, 45,000 families descend on the magical home of Father Christmas over a six-week period each year.
Starting as an idea from Alison – a mother of four boys, a school teacher at the time and a lover of early childhood – Lapland UK is formed around Alison’s world.
The ‘Elven world’, built around stories later made into books, that the mum-of-four told her boys, is the place the ‘little folk’ as children are referred to at Lapland, visit with their families.
At the site, children arrive via personalised invitation from Father Christmas and go on a four-and-a-half-hour journey through an ‘enchanted forest’, meeting mystical elves, helping make toys in the toy factory, and of course, a chat with the man himself.
After years of selling out tickets for the experience, Michael and Alison’s expansion into a second site in the north west doubled the amount of visitors to more than 90,000 in 2025. And speaking now to the Manchester Evening News about the enormity of the project they brought to Macclesfield’s Capesthorne Hall for the first time last year, it’s clear the couple felt more than ever the weight of responsibility they shoulder with each visit from a family and their child.
The tricky path the Battles found themselves trying to navigate is a well-trodden one in the world of business – scaling up to more than 90,000 families coming through the doors while keeping that key personal touch for each and every visitor. It’s a problem almost every success story has to overcome, but when dealing with a child’s ‘precious wonder’ as Michael puts it, the Lapland UK owners felt for them, the stakes were much higher.
“Those families are trusting myself and Alison and the Lapland team with their children’s belief and wonder. So we’ve got to get it right,” Michael said. “So it took a long time for us to get back to the point that we felt confident.”
“We had a huge interest from the get-go,” he added, recalling their initial Berkshire opening in 2006. “All very, very passionate mothers immediately sort of took a bet on me and Alison and trusted us.
“And if I’m honest, I’ve had people saying to me for years, ‘why don’t you do another one? Why don’t you do another one?’. But we wanted to get it right.”
That second Lapland was always the dream, according to Alison.
“We always had in our minds that we wanted two in the UK,” she explains. “One in the south and one in the north, so it’s easy for every family and child to get to.”
The search for a second site in the north eventually brought Lapland to Manchester – or more accurately, Cheshire. Although as Michael recalls, finding the right spot, when everything they looked at was compared to their near-20-year established world in Ascot, took a long time.
“We took our time and myself and Alison have been in this sort of creation laboratory for the last 15 years. And we always had Manchester in our eyes.
“But we knew we had to do it brilliantly because Ascot is so loved. And it’s a very, very high bar to come up against.”
He added: “We spent many months driving around, up and down the motorways, trying to find the perfect place.
“We found some that seemed perfect for what we were looking for but perhaps they were up in the hills and impossible for visitors to get to, or the parking wasn’t suitable for the scale of the site – and some had those things but the site itself wasn’t quite right, so it was a long process.
“But the moment we saw Capesthorne Hall, it had everything – we knew straight away the first time we walked around there. It’s a very magical place, it felt right.”
The Cheshire country estate may have been perfect, but it presented one particular obstacle. Unlike the original Lapland UK site, its northern counterpart had to be created entirely indoors.
“Manchester Lapland is all indoors – the site meant it had to be and we were also conscious of the weather in the north of the country,” Michael said.
It just meant that extra effort had to go into building the site – which we’re told is equivalent to 22 football pitches in size – and making it feel as though it’s part of the exact same ‘Elven world’ that’s accessed by families in Ascot, according to Alison.
“We’ve made sure it still has that outdoor feeling so you forget that you’re inside,” she told the M.E.N. “We brought 320 tonnes of mulch in and had trees brought in – we worked really hard to create that feeling of being outside.
“It has its own character but we are giving the same experience. It’s all part of the world that we’ve created.”
The debut year for Lapland Manchester last year was seemingly a resounding success. It was part of the appeal of the location, Alison tells us, that Capesthorne Hall is so close to Manchester Airport – and that helped attract families from a record 52 countries to both Lapland UK sites in 2025, turning the UK attraction into a now-global phenomenon.
The founders said that ‘believe it or not’ Lapland Manchester garnered even greater visitor feedback in its opening year than its well-established south England counterpart.
And in the opinion of Manchester Evening News Lifestyle Editor, Dianne Bourne, who visited last year: “There’s really no doubting this is the most epic, and extravagant, Christmas attraction I’ve ever been to.”
“The scale of what has been created is immense and the quality of Lapland Manchester is groundbreaking globally,” Michael said.
“But what I love is that beneath it all… lies the simple truth – and it’s the love of a mother trying to honour her children’s wonder. And that remains at the core of everything that Lapland stands for and everything that Lapland has and does going forward.
“The idea took us all the way to Manchester, where our ambition was nothing less than to create the greatest children’s experience the world has ever seen for Christmas.”
Tickets will be available via www.laplanduk.co.uk, with families encouraged to move quickly to secure one of Father Christmas’ final invitation
Lapland Manchester opens 7 November to 24 December.
