Why Nobody Wants to Visit Rhyl Anymore

In 1980, Rhyl gambled £4.25 million on Europe's first indoor surf pool, a seafront attraction that pulled four thousand visitors a day for most of a decade before the trust running it collapsed into liquidation by 2014, leaving a £30 million building nobody wanted and, two years later, a budget hotel chain in its place. This is the story of a Welsh resort town connected by rail from Chester in 1848 and built to sell two weeks of joy to factory workers — and how the neighborhood around that seafront became the poorest small area in all of Wales.