“In a word - dirty.
I don't really write reviews, unless a place is really good or really bad, and unfortunately this isn't a good one.
Firstly, you must buy your tickets online. When we arrived we were told we were too early and to wait in our car - fair enough. But when it came to our entry time we still had to wait in a big queue for 10 mins.
First impressions of inside was nothing worked! The lift was broken, the lockers were mostly broken (check if it locks before you put your clothes in!!), the changing room door didn't lock, 2 of the 4 toilets were broken, another was rammed full of toilet roll, around a third of the showers worked, but only 4 of them had warm water, some of the flumes were off, and half of the kids water area was broken!! Complete waste of our time and money.
Secondly was the cleanliness - there is none! The changing room floors were filthy - gritty and hair EVERYWHERE. We had sliders to wear to the pool edge, but was told by a young woman to take them off as we couldn't wear them past the showers. Fine, we thought, as we only intended on wearing them to the pool edge. A quick toilet break before the showers and we were met with toilets that looked like something from the 90s! The seats were badly discoloured (you can imagine the colour) and hanging off, and soap was no where to be found. The floor was really wet and obviously not just with pool water. Thank God we kept our sliders on.
The showers are a tight squeeze, and as stated above many don't work. One of the exits has been gated off, so the bottleneck in and out of the showers was pretty bad, but the amount of hair and grit was unreal. At this point I was really wondering why we came.
The large pool, river rapids and small slide are all fine, and the flumes that were open all looked fun, but having a little one with us we weren't going on anything big or fast, which was just as well as the queues were substantial. The small kids pool on the upper level was hot....and that was it! Water features and bubbles were turned off, so no fun water play apart from paddling. The other kids area with the large bucket that tips water on everyone was also a disappointment. The large bucket itself (and the little ones) was off, as were all of the water guns, so basically the area is a set of large, wet stairs and platforms. Pointless. There were a few tubes pouring out water to run under. That was it.
With it being the school holidays, the place is very busy and there are a lot of older kids there without adults. The majority were there having fun without any issues, but there were quite a few who were really rough in the water, banging into everyone. One older kid made a point of directing the water tubes in the kids area at my youngest child, to the point I had to ask her to stop. I was met with laughter and she continued directing the water at his head till he burst into tears and ended in a meltdown (he's autistic). When I asked the lifeguards to ask her to stop (she was doing it to every small child who walked past), they blew the whistle at her and made a 'stop' motion, then went back to chatting. That was it for us; it was back to the showers and time to head home. So disappointing. Not before we realised our sliders were missing - staff had collected them and put them in a bin bag in a cupboard?! WTF?
I also noted most of the lifeguards appear to be around late teens/ early 20s, all wearing dirty trainers by the pool and the majority of them just wandering about. I actually thought at the time 'God help anyone if there's an emergency in here'. Hopefully I'm wrong, but they all seemed to just be hanging about.
It's such a shame because the time capsule used to be a great place for all ages. The dirt, grime and general disrepair of the place ruin it now.
North Lanarkshire really need to shut the place down, clean it properly and reopen, then get money spent on fixing the place up.
I would avoid at all costs.”
“Tatty and unkempt, over priced and most of the features are broken or taped off: I felt genuinely ripped off last time. One slide open, half of the pool closed off, the bucket that tips water wasn’t working or any other part of the children’s area.”
“When I went into the website I was told to contact by phone reason being because the Corana virus is not away as of yet so so many booking each has to be taken yes granted website not up to much but all you had to do was phone for a session friendly staff in phone”
“The pool and slides itself were good but it was extremely dirty!! It took us a vast amount of time to get the band working for the lockers- not to mention the mess in the changing rooms!!! There was dirty everywhere!! To make matters even worse we all got kicked out the pool because there was a floating poo. The staff are so rude and there were to many people in the pool all at once!”
