Sustainable spaces, interactive exhibitions and fantastic venues for business and private events

Business event hire

Weddings and private event hire

The Wat Tyler Centre opened in Wat Tyler Country Park, Basildon in late July 2009.  The modern, sustainable visitor centre includes a great café with indoor and al fresco dining and offers marvellous rooms and facilities for business and private event hire.

The green centre (opened in 2011) is an exciting place to find out more about the environmental challenges facing the modern world, and to learn straightforward ways we can all approach the things we do every day with the environment in mind. It’s also an exemplar green building and a living showcase for exciting sustainable products and low carbon innovation.

The Heritage Lottery funded Wat Tyler Centre features a permanent exhibition themed around the industrial and environmental heritage of the park. The exhibition begins with the historical use of the site as an explosives factory at the end of the 19th Century, and moves on to explore the ways the land has been used ever since, notably as the Sea Transport Stores last active during the Suez crisis, then as a country park.

Visitors of all ages are invited to explore the exhibitions through graphics and interactives, ranging from the Wat Tyler Centre’s nitroglycerin mixing hut (where the roof blows off if you get the mix wrong), unexploded bomb you can de-fuze, and demolish a tower block to recycling games and video interactives in the green centre.