Pleasure beach tops tourist list

Visitor numbers fell 3% on 2006

Blackpool Pleasure Beach has topped a list of British tourist attractions with 5.5m visitors last year.

It beat venues such as the Tate Modern art gallery, the British Museum and the Eden project in Cornwall.

The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA) said the number of eastern European tourists visiting the pleasure beach had increased.

But numbers for the attraction have fallen slightly from 2006. It is free but is to begin charging £5 for entry.

Further investment

Liverpool attractions did well in 2007, with the city's World Museum and Maritime Museum increasing numbers by more than a third each.

London Zoo saw visitors increase by more than 25% to 1.3m, due to its new gorilla enclosure.

But the AVLA said the tourist industry needed further investment to compete to attract visitors, particularly from China and India.

Director Peter Broke said other countries were "slowly but surely overtaking Britain as a destination".

"...It is preventing the nation's fifth largest industry from optimising its potential earning power and creating significant numbers of new jobs," he said.

Some ALVA members, such as Madame Tussauds and Alton Towers, do not supply figures for the association's annual survey.