Summer Fireworks At The Needles and Alum Bay

The Needles hosts a weekly evening event with fireworks during the school summer holidays

My father was never a fan of The Needles pleasure park. His ideal Isle of Wight day out involved avoiding people, which is unlikely to happen at something described as a 'Landmark Attraction'.

And so, we never made it to the summertime fireworks displays growing up.

Personally, I quite like a bit of atmosphere at a busy event and so decided to take child one for an evening out.

We were blessed with an extraordinarily beautiful evening with orange skies and barely any wind.

Child one was particularly keen to ride on the chairlift. Her last ride had been when she was four years old. It was a little tense as she wriggled and refused my offers to help her stay safely onboard. ​

The chairlift was much more relaxing than it had been six years ago

Six years later, such issues had gone and we greatly enjoyed our trip down.

The cheapest way to ride the chairlift is to buy a 'Supersaver' book of 12 tickets for £9. We used seven tickets for an adult and a child to ride down the chairlift (£5.25 if you do the sums). It costs double for a return ticket.

Riding down the chairlift offers better views but riding up the chairlift saves you huffing and puffing. I rank a good view highly so we went for that option. As far as I can tell, you can't buy tickets at the bottom of the cliff so you need to make your mind up before setting off.

The views were glorious and it gave us one of the highlights of the summer.

After climbing back up the steps, we rode the carousel. This required six tokens rather than the five I had remaining from the chairlift. Luckily, I had one token which had been sitting in my wallet for a couple of years which I was able to pull out with great satisfaction.

I suspect that by next summer, child one will feel a little too old to ride the carousel with me. Let's not dwell on that for too long though (Ed: keep it light).  

Next up, was a Corrs tribute act accompanied by Irish dancers (well, why not?). 

Finally, at 9.30pm it was the fireworks. I was expecting these to whoosh off the cliff edge but - presumably for practical reasons - they launched further inland. This required the road leading to the Needles to close briefly.

Getting out the car park was a pretty drawn out process. My advice is to park near the exit if you want a quick getaway.

Even so, it was a really lovely evening and one which we will be repeating next year.