A few years ago, on the 1st of April 2021, I published a hoax here: Universal was opening a park in Paris, on the abandoned Europa City site. And five years ago, coming out of Universal Studios Japan, I wrote, in black and white: “it’s always a pleasure to visit a Universal park — all the more so since we don’t have one in Europe.”
That line hasn’t aged well — and that’s excellent news. Universal really is building its first European park. Further north than my hoax, far bigger, and this time it’s no joke. Here’s what we actually know, what’s still rumour, and why everyone’s talking about it — Disneyland Paris included.
What’s officially confirmed
The project now has an official name, unveiled on 3 June 2026 along with its logo: Universal United Kingdom Resort. A £6 billion project, presented at 11 Downing Street alongside Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy — London clearly means business.
What’s locked in:
- Where: in Bedford, on a former brickworks site south of the town, 45 minutes from London with fast rail links.
- When: opening targeted for 2031. Construction began in early 2026 after regulatory approval, with two major contractors confirmed in February 2026.
- What: a “world-class” park with several immersive lands, a 500-room hotel, and a retail-dining-entertainment complex.
- How much: Comcast NBCUniversal is committing over £5 billion across the five-year build, plus £1 billion in capital over the first ten years.
- The scale: it will be Universal’s 8th resort worldwide, and above all the first in Europe since 2004.
Universal has already had a park in Europe — and I walked through it
That phrase, “first Universal park in Europe since 2004”, deserves a personal note, because I visited the last one. It was PortAventura, in Catalonia: Universal owned it from 1998 to 2004, before pulling out to refocus its investments on its American and Asian parks. All that remains of the Universal era today is Woody Woodpecker.
In other words: Universal left Europe in 2004… and returns in 2031. The loop will have taken twenty-seven years to close — time enough for Europe’s theme-park market to mature and stop scaring investors off (remember how many closed their doors — Mirapolis, Zygofolies — and how close Euro Disney came to financial disaster).
To grasp the scale: what I saw in Osaka and Orlando
The figure being floated is 8.5 million visitors a year from opening. To put that in perspective, a bit of first-hand experience.
At Universal Studios Japan, in 2019, we stayed at the Keihan Universal Tower, a room with a sweeping view over the park. The park is a near-clone of the American version — Hollywood, New York, a slice of the Wizarding World, the Amazing Spider-Man ride — but with Cool Japan, a rather successful blend of local culture and American DNA: Sailor Moon in 4D, Attack on Titan, Godzilla vs Evangelion. The highlight was still the Best of Hollywood night parade (floats for Harry Potter, Jurassic World, Transformers, Minions, plus projections on the façades), and The Flying Dinosaur, a proper thrill. The Japanese welcome was flawless, an unlimited express pass was all but essential to make the most of it, and the memories are unforgettable.
In Orlando, we did both Universal parks and stayed at the Cabana Bay Beach Resort, a retro hotel that remains one of the best we’ve tried. And the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Islands of Adventure.
Aiming for 8.5 million visitors in year one is almost the level of a mature American Universal park — straight out of the gate. It’s ambitious. We’ll see in 2031 whether the promise holds.
Does the investment match the ambition?
To gauge the scale, the right comparison isn’t with the expansion of an existing park, but with building an entire resort from scratch — because that’s what Bedford is.
By that measure, Universal spent ~$7 billion (~£5.5bn) on Epic Universe in Orlando in 2025, and Disney ~$5.5 billion to build the entire Shanghai resort in 2016. Bedford’s ~£6 billion places it at the very top of that category: a genuine flagship park, not a budget outpost.
The most telling benchmark is right here at home: Disneyland Paris, built from scratch in 1992, cost around $4.4 billion — roughly $10 billion in today’s money — and nearly sank Euro Disney. The last major park created in Europe was therefore built at a comparable, even higher cost: building a park from the ground up is astronomical everywhere, not just in France.
Careful, though, not to confuse this with the ~€2 billion Disneyland Paris is investing right now: that sum doesn’t build a park, it densifies an existing one (Adventure Way, World of Frozen, the Disney Village refurbishment, Le Roi Lion soon). It “shows” a lot precisely because all the heavy infrastructure — land, hotels, station, back-of-house — has been there for decades.
(Figures compared as closely as scope and currency allow: the pound is an official figure, the euro and dollar equivalents are approximate conversions, and the scope varies from one project to another.)
A flagship project: surface area, lands and financing
The surface area. Let’s compare like with like. At opening, Bedford will be a single-park resort — one park, one hotel, one leisure complex — like Universal Osaka or Universal Beijing, not like the mature, two-park Disneyland Paris. A single Universal park covers around 54 walkable hectares (that’s the case in both Osaka and Beijing); Bedford’s developed footprint, ~193 hectares (park + hotel + complex), extendable to ~283, places it among the group’s largest single-park resorts — above Osaka, in the same range as the Epic Universe campus, below the Beijing giant (~400 ha). Above all, like Beijing before it, Bedford is already reserving land. Beijing opened with one park and two hotels, before launching a second park — built on Chinese IPs, including the Monkey King — five more hotels and, eventually, a water park. The 700 acres set aside at Bedford sketch out the same trajectory: shifting, one day, from single-park resort to a full multi-park destination.
The lands. Planning documents describe four distinct zones, for now under generic working names — “Core Zone”, “Lake Zone”, “West Gateway Zone” and “East Gateway Zone” — arranged, as often at Universal, around a central body of water.
The financing. Beyond Comcast’s £6 billion, the British government is committing ~£1.3 billion to the infrastructure and transport around the site — a public co-investment that speaks to the strategic importance placed on the project. And the economic impact? It’s the argument every park brandishes. Disneyland Paris publishes its own every year: according to its latest study (EY, March 2026), ~€120 billion contributed to the French economy since 1992, 70,000 jobs direct, indirect and induced, ~6% of national tourism revenue. Universal UK, for its part, projects ~£50 billion in economic benefit by 2055 and ~28,000 jobs. A word of caution, though: these figures are as much communication and lobbying tools as neutral measurements — DLP publishes its own to justify its relationship with the State, Universal brandishes its own to secure regulatory approval and public money. Read them as promotional orders of magnitude, not accounting truths — even if their impact on the economy is real, and very significant.
Copy-paste, or rethink for Europe?
That leaves the real question, the one about the industrial gamble: will Universal duplicate what already exists (little R&D, a safe bet) or rethink part of the offering for Europe (more expensive, riskier — the gamble Euro Disney made)?
Recent history gives us the recipe. In Osaka, it was a mix: a near-clone of the American park plus a “Cool Japan” zone tailored to the local audience. In Beijing (2021), same logic: most of it is cloned (Harry Potter, Jurassic World, Minions, Transformers), but Universal created Kung Fu Panda Land there, its very first world built on an IP rooted in Chinese culture — a land that exists only in Beijing. The Universal method, then: clone the safe bets, and add one or two worlds tailored to the market.
For Europe, two things play in the UK’s favour. First, its safe bet is already local: the Wizarding World of Harry Potter — the flagship attraction Universal duplicates everywhere — is… British. Here, the most bankable “copy-paste” is already home-grown content. But that’s exactly where the irony lies: Warner, which owns Harry Potter and licenses it to Universal without exclusivity, already runs its own Warner Bros. Studio Tour in London — just 45 minutes from Bedford. Nothing legally forbids the two coexisting (Warner is opening a Harry Potter land in Abu Dhabi, after all), but nor is there any guarantee that Warner wants a competing Wizarding World so close to its British jewel. The most obvious franchise for a British park is thus, paradoxically, the one whose rights are most contested on British soil. One to watch closely. Second, some major licences are out of reach, which forces a degree of originality:
- Marvel: no. The only Universal park that exploits Marvel is Islands of Adventure in Orlando, via a contract predating Disney’s acquisition — perpetual but limited to that region. Everywhere else, Marvel belongs to Disney. (That’s precisely why Walt Disney World, in Florida, still can’t do Spider-Man: Universal’s rights stand in the way.)
- The Simpsons: almost certainly not either. Since the Fox acquisition (2019), Disney owns The Simpsons. Universal’s licence (Orlando, Hollywood) expires around 2027-2028, with no perpetuity clause, and Disney has no interest in renewing it for a competitor — especially with a Simpsons film due in 2027. With Bedford opening in 2031, after that deadline: don’t expect a British Springfield.
The upshot: caught between the safe bets it owns (Harry Potter — at home —, Jurassic World, Minions, Transformers, perhaps Nintendo) and the licences it can’t have, Universal will be pushed towards British and original content. Neither a wholesale copy-paste nor a total reinvention: something in between, cloned on its safe bets and anglicised where it needs to be. For us Europeans, that’s rather good news.
The attractions: what’s going around, and what is NOT confirmed
Let’s be clear, because this is where a lot of articles get carried away: no world, no attraction is officially confirmed. The rumours — repeated all over the place — point to franchises like Paddington, James Bond, Harry Potter, Jurassic World or the Minions, with the idea of British icons taking pride of place. But at this stage, Universal has confirmed nothing. Leads, not promises.
Our own wish, though, is unashamed: Nintendo. We had the good sense to travel to Japan just before the world shut down — but as a result we missed Super Nintendo World, which was meant to open for the 2020 Olympics, by a few months (Covid pushed it to 2021). It has since spread to Hollywood and then Orlando, always after our visits. Suffice to say that a Super Nintendo World at Bedford, an hour’s flight away… we’d sign up in a heartbeat. (Nothing official, once again — just our dearest wish, entirely plausible all the same.)
And why not Doctor Who? The franchise has just been dropped by Disney+ (late 2025, after two seasons), and the BBC — which owns it solo again — is precisely on the lookout for a new partner. A Doctor Who world would give the park the extra dash of British soul that would suit it so well. We’re dreaming, of course — Universal has hinted at nothing of the sort — but it’s less far-fetched than it looks.
The real stakes: Disneyland Paris can no longer rest on its laurels
You might think this project threatens Disneyland Paris. I see it differently: it partly explains it.
DLP remains the most-visited park in Europe. But a Universal aiming for 8.5 million visitors would slot in as the continent’s number two, on the same turf. And it’s no coincidence that Disneyland Paris is reinventing itself right now to the tune of billions. After years of under-investment, the second park has just undergone its metamorphosis into Disney Adventure World — World of Frozen, Adventure Way — and above all, on the 2028 horizon, the Le Roi Lion land, a bet on one of the most popular and timeless franchises in the Disney catalogue. Europe’s number one is clearly playing to win.
And as I wrote in my report on Disney Adventure World, there’s still room for ambition: one or two more zones on this second park (Pandora, Encanto, Vaiana?), and above all the third park promised in the agreement with the French State. That’s exactly where Universal changes the game: such competition, on the same market, is precisely the kind of trigger that pushes a giant to keep its promises rather than defer them.
Europe’s leading destination can no longer rest on its laurels: already strongly challenged by innovative parks that invest, like Parc Astérix, Futuroscope, Efteling and Europa-Park, it now sees this new leisure heavyweight come and reshuffle the whole deck. And for us, visitors, that’s rather excellent news: when the giants square off, it’s the parks that raise their game. Above all, we hope this rivalry stays healthy — that it lifts the whole European park ecosystem, rather than tipping into a mere arms race.
A magnet for the whole of Europe?
There remains a more optimistic hypothesis than simple rivalry. In the United States, you don’t choose between Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando: you do both, on the same trip. In Japan, many string together Tokyo Disney and Universal Studios Japan in Osaka. We did exactly that, each time. What if Europe became a “two-for-one” destination too? From Marne-la-Vallée–Chessy — the station at the gates of Disneyland Paris — or from Paris Gare du Nord, Eurostar reaches London in a little over two hours (one connection, at Lille or in Paris), and Bedford is then only ~40 minutes away. A “European parks circuit” that would bundle Disneyland Paris and a Universal resort into a single trip: enough to grow the pie rather than merely split it — especially for a long-haul visitor planning a grand parks holiday.
And Brexit in all this? Less off-putting than it’s made out to be for a European neighbour: a passport (instead of an ID card) and an electronic travel authorisation — the UK’s ETA — quick and cheap to obtain online. A formality, not a border.
Until 2031
2031 is a long way off. We’ll be able to follow the construction from afar and, I hope, be among the first to experience these new attractions. Until then, from France, Bedford will be reachable via Luton airport (45 minutes from London), unless you prefer the train or the ferry. A serious future rival for a weekend park trip — but not for a while yet.
I’ll be following the build closely. We’ll be there, as always. Sooner or later.
A small confession: this article is the serious version of an April Fools’ hoax I published on 1 April 2021 — back then, Universal was landing in Paris. Reality ended up outdoing the joke.
