The Sun Centre was Rhyl's most ambitious twentieth-century attraction — Europe's first indoor surfing pool when it opened in 1980, a £4.25 million act of faith in a resort already beginning to feel the effects of foreign holiday competition. For a generation of North Wales children, it was simply the most exciting building in the world. It closed in 2014 and was demolished in 2016.
What It Was
The Sun Centre opened on 26 May 1980 on the West Parade, occupying a large site directly on the seafront. At its core was the wave pool — a full-size indoor surfing pool capable of generating artificial waves up to a metre high — which was genuinely novel: nothing like it existed anywhere in Europe at the time. Around it were water slides, a leisure pool, a sunbathing area under a vast glass roof, and various other attractions that, in combination, created the experience of a beach holiday regardless of whatever the Welsh weather was doing outside.
For the first decade it was extraordinarily popular, drawing visitors from across the north-west of England and Wales. It gave Rhyl something that Llandudno and Colwyn Bay couldn't match — a reason to come even if it rained, which in North Wales is not an abstract consideration. At its peak in the mid-1980s, annual visitor numbers were very substantial.
The Authentic Experience
Memory is selective, but those who were there tend to recall certain things with particular vividness. The water slides, for instance: a series of tubes that descended to the leisure pool at speeds that, in retrospect, were probably not entirely supervised. The joins between the plastic tube sections were not always flush. A smooth descent of the big slide could, at certain junctions, remove a meaningful quantity of skin from the back of the thighs. This was understood to be part of the experience. You got back in the queue.
The wave pool operated on a timed schedule — a siren, a countdown, and then the surge. What also operated on an unpredictable schedule was the pool evacuation: a whistle blast, a sudden pause in the machinery, and a hundred people climbing out over the side with the practised resignation of those who knew exactly what this meant. A lifeguard would move purposefully. Everyone would stand dripping on the tiles for fifteen minutes while the matter was resolved. It happened often enough that regulars developed a sixth sense for when conditions were ripening. It happened often enough, in fact, that it became part of the cultural memory of the place — a shared acknowledgement that when you put thousands of small children in warm water for the day, certain outcomes are statistically inevitable. You got back in.
The Long Decline
By the 1990s the competition had caught up. Indoor waterparks became more common; the novelty of the wave pool diminished; the building itself — which had always required intensive maintenance — was ageing. Investment in refurbishment didn't keep pace with the wear on the infrastructure. Visitor numbers fell. The Sun Centre became, gradually, a diminished version of itself: some facilities closed, then more, the wave pool itself operating only intermittently in its final years.
It closed permanently in February 2014. Denbighshire County Council, which had owned and operated it for years, cited the cost of the necessary refurbishment — estimated at over £30 million — as prohibitive. The building was demolished in 2016. A Travelodge now occupies the site.
The Legacy
SC2, which opened on the West Parade in 2019, is in some sense the Sun Centre's successor — a new indoor waterpark investment that demonstrates the same logic that drove the original: that Rhyl needs a covered wet-weather attraction to compete in a fickle seaside economy. SC2 is smaller and more focused than the Sun Centre at its peak, but it is new, it is well-equipped, and it exists. The Sun Centre, for all its later problems, proved the concept. That is something.
For those who visited it as children, the Sun Centre occupies a specific place in memory — the particular smell of chlorine and humid plastic, the roar of the wave machine, the feeling of the artificial wave lifting you off your feet. That generation is now in its forties and fifties. They remember it.