Oxygen Crawley: 22,000 Sq Ft Trampoline Park in a Former Gym

Oxygen Activeplay opened its 19th indoor activity park in England on Friday 16 October 2026. The site sits on the first floor of the former Nuffield Health unit at Crawley Leisure Park, on London Road in Crawley.

The published details are unusually complete for an opening of this size. The venue covers 22,000 sq ft (2,044 m²) and holds more than 40 interconnected trampolines. The operator put the investment above £2 million, and entry starts at £15.95 per person.

Those four figures answer a question that comes up in almost every first call we take from a buyer: what does a second-generation unit cost to convert, and what does it earn per hour of floor time?

This article converts the disclosed numbers into per-square-foot and per-hour terms. It also separates what the operator published from what it did not, because the gap between the two is where most feasibility models go wrong.

One caution before the arithmetic. An opening is not a template. A first-floor gym conversion carries constraints that a new-build shell does not, and several of them decide the equipment list before anyone chooses an attraction.

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1. What opened, and what was actually disclosed

Oxygen Crawley is a conversion, not a new build. The unit previously operated as a gym, and the park now occupies its first floor. That single fact explains most of the engineering questions later in this article.

The slides deserve a sentence of their own. The operator’s own park page describes them as under construction, and the local report says they are expected to open soon. A venue can therefore trade for weeks with part of its advertised offer missing. That is normal in phased openings, and it matters when you compare published ticket prices against a completed fit-out.

Oxygen has not published a floor plan, a stated capacity, a revenue split or a cost breakdown for this site. We are not going to invent them. What follows uses only the disclosed figures, and every derived number is labelled as derived.

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2. The building sets limits before the budget does

A former gym is an attractive shell: column grid, services already in the ceiling, parking outside, and a landlord who wants a tenant that drives repeat visits. It also imposes six checks that a new build would not.

2.1 Floor loading, including the dynamic case

What it is A trampoline bed transfers a jumper’s landing force into the frame, then into the slab through the legs or a base frame. The static weight of the equipment is rarely the problem.

What it decides Whether the slab and the supporting beams can take the reaction loads, and whether the beds can sit where the design wants them. On a first floor, the answer sometimes moves the jump zone away from the middle of the plan.

What to verify Ask the equipment supplier for reaction loads per support point in writing, and hand them to a structural engineer who classifies the floor under the applicable load code, such as BS EN 1991-1-1 in the UK. A gym’s original design load tells you what the gym needed, not what a trampoline floor needs.

2.2 Clear height, measured rather than assumed

A gym ceiling looks generous until you measure the duct, the sprinkler branch and the light fittings hanging below it. Jump clearance is measured from the bed to the lowest obstruction, not from the slab to the soffit.

No single ceiling figure applies across markets, and ISO 23659 does not hand you one. The supplier’s drawings set the minimum for the specific product, and the building either meets it or the layout changes. Measuring before design is cheaper than discovering the problem after the steel is fabricated.

2.3 Vertical access for large components

Trampoline frames arrive as long steel sections, mats arrive rolled, and airbag blowers arrive as crates. A first-floor unit needs a route: a goods lift with the right dimensions, a loading bay with the right turning circle, or a crane and a temporary opening in the façade.

That decision belongs in the programme, not in the installation week. A night-time crane lift is a real cost, and it usually appears in no one’s equipment budget.

2.4 Ventilation and heat rejection

A gym’s air handling was sized for gym occupancy and gym activity patterns. A trampoline floor packs more people into the same area and pushes them harder, so the cooling load per square metre rises. Re-rating plant is a base-build cost that lands on the tenant.

2.5 Impact noise through the slab

Ground-floor retail below a jump floor hears every landing. If the unit sits above another occupier, the acoustic treatment belongs in the fit-out budget and in the lease negotiation, because a complaint after opening is expensive to fix.

2.6 Fire strategy for a change of use

Moving from gym use to assembly use changes travel distances, exit widths and the way the space is managed on a busy Saturday. In England, Approved Document B governs the building side. ISO 23659 explicitly excludes fire regulations from its scope, so the equipment standard will not answer this question for you.

The pattern worth remembering: on a conversion, the four costs that most often surprise owners are structural strengthening, plant re-rating, acoustic separation and vertical access. None of them appears on an equipment quotation.

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3. The attraction mix is five businesses sharing one ticket

Look past the marketing list and Crawley runs five products under one roof. Each one does a different job, and each one carries a different maintenance profile.

The airbag is the item most often deleted when a budget is cut, and it is also the one that changes what a guest will attempt on the floor. If you keep it, budget for the blower, the anchor points and the repair patches at the start rather than in year two. Our park accessories range lists what sits around a jump floor and what wears out first.

The mix explains the age policy. Open play is sold for ages 4 and up, while toddler play and soft play cover 0 to 5. A park built only on trampolines would turn away the younger sibling, and a family with one child aged 7 and one aged 2 is a single transaction, not two.

Standards follow the equipment, not the brand. ISO 23659:2022 covers the design, construction, inspection and maintenance of trampoline parks, including airbag and foam-pit landing areas, and it states plainly that it does not cover non-trampoline activities such as artificial climbing or obstacle courses. The soft play structure and the slides fall under the EN 1176 family instead, with the surfacing beneath them under EN 1177. A US park would work to ASTM F2970 for the court. A UK site does not, and the two documents are not interchangeable. HSE’s HSG175 sets out safe practice for amusement equipment and sits alongside the equipment standards rather than replacing them.

For a buyer, that split has a practical consequence. Ask for the compliance file per zone, not per venue. One certificate covering “the park” tells you very little when half the floor area sits outside the scope of the standard it cites.

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4. The price ladder: what £15.95, £20.45 and £24.95 actually buy

Three open-play prices sit on the board. Converting them to a rate per hour shows the shape of the offer more clearly than the headline figure does.

The derivation is simple arithmetic on published prices. Take the 90-minute ticket: £20.45 divided by 1.5 hours gives £13.63 per hour. The 120-minute ticket divides £24.95 by two hours to give £12.48. Play Together is four tickets for the price of three, so £15.95 multiplied by three equals £47.85, or £11.96 per head once the fourth guest is included at no charge.

Two features of this ladder are worth copying.

The first is that the shortest ticket is the anchor, not the product. A 60-minute session is priced high enough that the 90-minute upgrade looks like good value at £4.50 more. Guests who take the longer session spend more in total and occupy the floor for longer, which reduces the queue at the till on a busy day.

The second is that the discount is attached to a group, not to a person. Play Together rewards the family or the birthday group that arrives together. That is a different lever from a percentage discount for an individual, and it protects the headline price.

Read the small print as well. The published prices apply to online and phone bookings, carry a £1.50 booking service fee at checkout, and walk-in prices at reception are higher. On a single £15.95 ticket, that fixed fee adds 9.4%. On a four-ticket Play Together order, the same fee adds 3.1%. The structure nudges guests towards larger baskets and towards booking ahead, which helps the operator plan staffing.

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5. The weekday timetable is the real product

The price board is only half the story. The other half is when each product is allowed to run, and the term-time timetable is unusually explicit about it.

The gap between 13:30 and 15:30 on a weekday is the most informative line in that table. The published term-time timetable closes the park to the public for those two hours and reopens it for the after-school window. The result is fewer trading hours, a lower wage cost and a cleaner handover between the toddler session and the evening.

The after-school product deserves attention. For £15.95, a child gets unlimited open play from 15:30 until closing, a hot meal and a slush drink. That price equals a 60-minute open-play ticket. The operator trades floor time it would not otherwise sell against food margin and a longer stay, and it books the family into a slot that most parks leave half empty.

The SEN session runs on Wednesday and Sunday evenings at £9.95, with a carer included in the price. It is the lowest price on the board and it sits in two hours a trampoline park usually writes off. The commercial logic is weaker than the community logic, and both are real: a quiet session builds a relationship with families who would otherwise never book, and the marginal cost of running it is staffing plus power.

Timing the opening matters as much as the timetable. Crawley opened on 16 October, immediately before the October half-term, and the park switched to a 09:00–19:00 holiday timetable from 19 October. The first trading weeks are therefore peak weeks, which flatters early revenue and stresses the building at the same time. A 2025 UK study of paediatric trampoline referrals at a two-hospital trust, published in Cureus, recorded peaks in April and August; school holidays are when both revenue and incident rates rise.

Weekly ticket revenue ≈ Σ (sessions in week × capacity per session × ticket price × occupancy)

Weekday capacity  = morning window + after-school window
Weekend capacity  = full-day window
Holiday capacity  = full-day window, every day

Fill that formula with your own capacity and occupancy, not with someone else’s. Crawley has not published its capacity per session, so any revenue figure for this venue would be a guess dressed as a calculation.

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6. £2 million over 22,000 sq ft, and what the ratio leaves out

The stated investment gives one clean benchmark, provided you treat it as a floor rather than a total.

Both per-unit figures are derived from published numbers and should be read as minimums. “More than £2 million” means the true ratio is higher, and “more than 40” means the area per trampoline is smaller.

What the £2 million covers is not published. That is not a criticism; almost no operator breaks out fit-out costs, and the silence is standard. It does mean the ratio is only useful if you apply the same discipline to your own quotation. Ask for five separate lines:

• Equipment supply, itemised by zone, with the reaction loads and the certification file attached.
• Installation labour, including supervision days on site and the cost of a second visit.
• Base-build works: structural strengthening, plant re-rating, acoustic separation, fire strategy changes.
• Fit-out beyond equipment: flooring, wall finishes, café, party rooms, signage, lockers, tills.
• Pre-opening costs: recruitment, training, licensing, marketing, and the weeks of rent before the first ticket is sold.

Most quotations compete on the first line and ignore the rest. Two quotes can carry identical equipment lists and still sit a long way apart on price, with the whole gap in lines three to five.

The 550 sq ft per trampoline figure is a density check, not a target. Density decides how many guests a session can hold, and therefore how much revenue an hour of floor time can produce. Push it too far and the safety margins between beds, the landing zones and the sightlines for staff all shrink together, which is the point at which a supervisor can no longer see the far corner of the floor. Pull it too far the other way and you have bought floor area that sells no tickets.

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7. What nineteen parks changes, and what it does not

Crawley is the operator’s 19th indoor activity park in England. That number carries real advantages for the company and one specific risk for anyone copying the site.

The advantage is repetition. A chain that has opened eighteen parks before this one has a standard layout, a standard equipment package, a standard training programme and a supplier who already knows the drawings. Design cost per site falls, snagging lists shorten, and the nineteenth opening is a project rather than an experiment.

The risk is the pilot attraction. Crawley is the first Oxygen venue to install the interactive pixel floor. In a chain of nineteen, a new attraction can be tested at one site, debugged with the supplier, and rolled out later if it works. A single-site owner who installs the same product buys the pilot, the debugging and the downtime, with no eighteenth site to spread the learning across.

That asymmetry has a contractual answer. If you are the first installation of a product in your market, ask for three things in writing: a spare-parts list with lead times, a service schedule that names who attends and how quickly, and a software support term that outlasts the warranty. An attraction that stops working is not a maintenance issue; it is a sold ticket that cannot be delivered.

Supervision intensity is the other thing a chain learns by repetition. A UK study of trampoline park injuries at a district general hospital, published in the Bulletin of Emergency and Trauma in 2019, followed 71 patients over sixteen months. Twenty-five percent were admitted, and the pre-hospital, emergency and in-patient cost came to more than £80,000. Divided across those 71 cases, that is roughly £1,127 per injury, or about 71 open-play tickets at the Crawley 60-minute rate. The arithmetic is ours, not the authors’, and it is a blunt comparison, but it frames the trade: one injury that reaches hospital costs about as much as seventy admissions.

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8. What this venue does not tell you

Four things are missing from the public record, and each one would change a feasibility model.

There is no floor plan. We know the area and the trampoline count. We do not know the zone boundaries, the circulation route, the party-room positions or how the first-floor column grid was resolved. Anyone who publishes a layout diagram for this venue is drawing an assumption.

There is no capacity figure. Sessions are sold in 60-, 90- and 120-minute blocks, but the number of guests per block is not published. Capacity is the most important input in any revenue model, and it is the number a competitor can copy fastest, which is why operators keep it quiet.

There is no revenue split. Ticket, café, party and retail contributions are unknown. A park with four party packages may earn a third of its revenue from birthdays, or a tenth. The published material does not say.

Part of the offer is not open yet. Two large slides are still under construction. The price board is live before the full attraction list is, which is normal for a phased opening and worth remembering when you benchmark against a completed venue.

Three checks are worth running before you copy anything from this project:

1. Measure the clear height to the lowest obstruction, not to the ceiling. Take the measurement in the exact location where the jump zone will sit, and get it signed off before the drawings are frozen. See how we set out a full equipment layout for a 22,000 sq ft park.

2. Get the reaction loads in writing and send them to a structural engineer. A first-floor conversion lives or dies on this. If a supplier cannot produce load data per support point, that is your answer about the supplier.

3. Price the building works separately from the equipment. The rent you pay for a cheap box often returns as strengthening, plant and acoustic work. Our breakdown of what rent per square foot actually costs in admissions shows how quickly that trade changes the answer.

If you are weighing a conversion against a new build, the fastest way to compare them is to send us the unit’s dimensions, the floor you are on and the ceiling services you can see. We will come back with a layout that respects the building rather than one that assumes it away.

Get a free design and quote →

Two more resources if you are still at the site-selection stage: our design-to-delivery process explains what we need from a floor plan, and our safety and standards page sets out how certification is documented per zone.

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FAQ

How much does it cost to enter Oxygen Crawley?

Open play is £15.95 for 60 minutes, £20.45 for 90 minutes and £24.95 for two hours. A Play Together ticket gives four 60-minute places for £47.85. Prices apply to online and phone bookings and carry a £1.50 booking fee, and walk-in tickets at reception cost more. Toddler Play is £13.95 for one adult and one toddler, SEN Peaceful Play is £9.95 with a carer included, and the term-time After School Fun and Feast package starts at £15.95 with a meal and a drink.

Can a first-floor former gym be converted into a trampoline park?

Yes, and Crawley is an example, but four items have to be settled before design. The slab and beams need checking against the equipment’s reaction loads, the clear height has to be measured to the lowest service, large steel sections need a route into the unit, and the fire strategy has to be reassessed for assembly use. A gym’s original design assumptions do not transfer to a jump floor.

What ceiling height does a trampoline park need?

There is no single number that applies across markets, and ISO 23659 does not set one. The minimum comes from the equipment supplier’s drawings for the specific product, measured from the bed to the lowest obstruction in the jump zone. Measure the building first, then choose the equipment that fits it, rather than choosing equipment and hoping the ceiling agrees.

Which safety standards apply to a UK trampoline park?

ISO 23659:2022 covers the design, construction, inspection and maintenance of trampoline parks and their landing areas, including airbags. Soft play structures and slides fall under the EN 1176 family, with impact-attenuating surfacing under EN 1177. Building regulations, fire strategy and food safety sit outside all three. ASTM F2970 is the US trampoline court document and does not govern a UK site, so the two should never be quoted interchangeably.

Is 22,000 sq ft a good size for a trampoline park?

It is a workable size for a mixed offer. Crawley fits more than 40 trampolines plus an airbag, interactive games, soft play, a café and party rooms into that area, at roughly 550 sq ft per trampoline. Whether it suits your site depends on the mix you intend to sell and the population within your drive time. A park built only on jump beds at that density leaves little room for the age groups that pay for birthday parties.

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Sources

1. Sussex Express, Sam Morton, “Inside Crawley’s newest attraction featuring 40 trampolines and interactive games”, 16 October 2026 — sussexexpress.co.uk
2. Oxygen Activeplay, “Oxygen Activeplay Crawley” park page: prices, timetable, attractions and address, accessed 22 October 2026 — oxygenactiveplay.co.uk
3. International Organization for Standardization, ISO 23659:2022, “Sports and recreational facilities — Trampoline parks — Safety requirements”, published November 2022, confirmed 2024 — iso.org
4. Jordan SJ, To CJ, Shafafy R, Davidson AE, Gill K, Solan MC, “Trampoline Park Injuries and Their Burden on Local Orthopaedic and Emergency Services”, Bulletin of Emergency and Trauma, 2019 — PubMed 31198806
5. Saltajai K, Maxwell M, Kirupakaran T, Jiang M, Bakko F, Zakaria B, Sharma R, “Incidence and Trends in Paediatric Trampoline-Related Injuries”, Cureus, 2025 — PubMed 41216077
6. Health and Safety Executive, HSG175, “Fairgrounds and amusement parks: guidance on safe practice” — hse.gov.uk
7. Sussex Express, “Oxygen Crawley gets children’s seal of approval ahead of £2m activity park opening”, October 2026 — sussexexpress.co.uk