25 years on, the Eden Project is fighting for survival

Telegraph

4 days ago

The Icelandic poppies are popping. The cacao pods have emerged. The Japanese garden is bursting with colour. After a sunny March and a wet April, the conditions are just right for an explosive spring display at the Eden Project.
But despite the flourishing scenes, the outlook isn't so rosy in the Eden Project's boardroom.
A quarter of a century after opening its doors to the public, the visionary horticultural project faces its biggest challenges to date.
In January 2025 the Eden Project slashed one fifth of its workforce due to declining visitor numbers and rising costs, with extreme weather patterns and ageing infrastructure bringing additional challenges for the institution.
The Eden Project dream, like the global ecosystem that it champions, is more precarious than ever before. Yet the people behind it say their work has only just begun.
Making science sexy
The Eden Project will 'make science sexy'. That was the promise of the Eden Project's former marketing director, Paul Travers, when the first phase of the project opened 25 years ago, in May 2000.
Those early visitors could visit the exhibition centre and take a tour of the former clay pit, a crater the size of 35 football pitches, where the project's famous bubbles – big enough to house the Tower of London – were beginning to spawn.
'This was the moment we realised it would be a bigger beast than we anticipated,' says Dan James, Eden Project's development director. 'The working assumption was that we'd attract around 650,000 visitors per year. In the first six months after the soft launch, half a million people turned up. It was completely beyond our expectations.'
Meanwhile, exotic plant species from around the world had been selected and transported to a nursery on the estate. The scope of the project was colossal, costing £140 million in total. There was even a nationwide scaffolding shortage, because 230 miles of the stuff (a Guinness world record) was being used to build the Eden Project's biomes.
Just four months after its Mediterranean and tropical biomes and gardens opened to the public, in March 2001, more than 800,000 visitors had passed through its doors. The Eden Project was such a success that its bosses placed adverts in West Country newspapers urging people to stay away.
'I think there was a general consensus at the time that Eden might have been one of the millennium projects most likely to fail, but I think the opposite is true,' says James.
The Eden Project quickly became a symbol of Cornwall's prospering tourism industry.
It has hosted some of the world's biggest musicians: Elton John, the Beach Boys, Amy Winehouse and Oasis have all played their anthemic hits to the backdrop of brightly lit domes.
It marked its territory in popular culture, too. Halle Berry abseiled down one of the biomes in the 2002 Bond film Die Another Day.
Ten years after opening, the Eden Project had attracted more than a million visitors per year, far exceeding all expectations and regularly ranking in the top 20 in the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA) list.
'It was completely beyond our expectations,' says James. The project, nobody could deny, was proving to be a roaring success.
The fall of Eden?
The first cracks began to show in 2012, when the Eden Project trust revealed a deficit of £6.3 million for the year, compared to a surplus of £136,000 the previous year. They put the struggles down to poor weather, the economic downturn and the London 2012 Olympics. That year, the Eden Project reported less than a million visitors for the first time and was forced to make job cuts as a result.
Malcolm Bell, the former boss at Visit Cornwall, said at the time that he wasn't surprised: 'Repeat and return business is harder for Cornwall than the likes of London. What is a 'must do' the first time, becomes a 'maybe' the second time,' he said.
By 2024, the Eden Project had dropped to number 54 in the ALVA list of top tourist attractions. It reported 673,625 visits, fewer than Clumber Park in the East Midlands, with a year-on-year footfall drop of 6 per cent. That number is almost a third of the 1.8 million visitors who passed through its doors during its first year of operation. While nobody expected the project to maintain the feverish levels of interest of its early days, that still represents a drop of 66 per cent.
Why so? James says that, like many tourism businesses, the Eden Project suffered greatly during the pandemic and hasn't fully recovered since.
'When visitors aren't coming to Cornwall, that's a challenge. We saw a bit of that last year. We've also got some unique challenges because of our site: we're in a hole in the ground, and that costs a lot of money to maintain,' he said, adding that worsening floods and storms have affected the site, which sits beneath the water table.
With visitor numbers down so dramatically, eyes naturally turn to the price point. An adult ticket on the door is £42 and a child aged between five and 16 costs £16. For a family of four, this means a family ticket costs £116 (booked online in advance: £100).
'It's always a conversation we have at board meetings, almost on a weekly basis. When you pay to come in, that's your annual pass, meaning you can come in as many times as you want for the rest of the year. There are also discounts for locals and for people on universal credit,' says James.
'The real challenge is to keep people wanting to come back, and making Eden not just a bucket list destination but a place where you want to come on a regular basis to see how it's changing and what's going on.'
As for the state of the domes, James says: 'The biomes may be 25 years old, but they still look amazing. There are bits that are fraying around the edges. Generally, it's in good nick.'
Nobody can accuse the Eden Project bosses of sitting on their hands. Two years ago the project drilled three miles underground and built a geothermal energy plant which now heats its biomes, along with thousands of homes near Truro, local schools and the Royal Cornwall Hospital.
The site has also moved with the times in terms of its wider offering. Over the years, new play areas, restaurants, a canopy walkway, a giant swing, a seasonal ice rink and even a zip wire have added a slice of fun to the visitor experience.
What's next? The Eden Project has set its sights on growth beyond the south Cornish coast. The Eden Project North, in Morecambe, is expected to open in 2028 and there are plans in the pipeline for outposts in Dundee and Northern Ireland. Farther afield, the Eden Project has a centre in development in Qingdao, China, and proposals for an Eden Project Australia in a former coal mile in Anglesea, Victoria.
'Eden's mission, inspiring positive action for the planet, is more important now than it's ever been,' says James. 'But if we want to have a national role, we need to be more than just delivering our educational work in the bottom left-hand corner of the UK. We need a bigger reach and a bigger audience.
'The best is yet to come for Eden.'