A Day at Gripped London

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For Little Man’s birthday last month we spent the day at Gripped London, a high ropes adventure activity with so much more on offer. We couldn’t wait to visit and push us all out of our comfort zones!

What is Gripped London?

Gripped is billed as West London’s heart-racing aerial adrenaline park! It’s an unforgettable day out for outdoor activity and adventure lovers with so many activities to try out: High Ropes, Zip Lines, Bag Jumps, Speed Slides, and the Tree Top Net Park.

Booking Gripped

We saw a great deal on Groupon which gave us inclusive activity passes for around half the standard price, and meant we could go on each attraction throughout our day at Gripped. You can see the current Groupon offers here.

Alternatively, if you want to just book one or two activities or are booked last minute, you can book direct with Gripped. Find out more here.

Getting to Gripped

Gripped is based in Hounslow and it’s easy to drive to, with plenty of on site parking – although you do also have to pay a parking charge – £1 per hour. There’s also details on the Gripped site for getting there by train, bus and even cycling if you’re local.

We arrived at Gripped about half an hour ahead of our timed booking but we were let in straight away. The staff on reception were lovely and friendly, getting us to fill in waivers – we’d done it online but they hadn’t gone through for some reason – and also giving us coloured bibs to wear.

The Gripped facilities

As well as the activities at Gripped there are seating areas to have a break or enjoy a picnic, water fountains and nice, clean toilets. The Gripped website does state that there’s a cabin for food but this wasn’t open when we visited and instead there were signs saying you could access Hobbledown Heath next door to make the most of their refreshment options.

The Gripped activities

Unlike other attractions with just a high ropes course on site, Gripped is home to multiple attractions – and you can pay to do just one or multiple attractions during your visit. As we had inclusive passes, we could do each activity during the day and it made for a really full day out.

High Ropes

We started our day out with the high ropes course and were harnessed up, given helmets and watched a safety briefing before we went on the course. To be able to participate you have to be over 140cm tall and under 120kg. Gripped have lockers where you can put your belongings during the activities but you need to take your own padlock or buy one from reception.

The high ropes course has two sides that you can complete – an easier one and harder one – and it took us over an hour to complete one of the courses, with so many different elements throughout it. There are zip lines, bridges, swinging walkways, ropes and nets. It’s great fun but physically challenging – I’d be surprised if anyone doesn’t ache the next day!

There are staff members on patrol under the high ropes course and will help when needed. LP needed a little help crossing one element and we also saw someone getting helped who had hurt themselves. It’s good to know that there are people there if you need them. However, you are constantly attached to the course, just having to add a zippy attachment when doing zip lines and we felt safe throughout.

We really enjoyed the high ropes course and had chosen to do the easier course – which was still pretty challenging. We have said we’ll go back at a later date to do the harder high ropes course for even more of a challenge!

Tree Top Net Park

After the high ropes course we felt we needed something a little easier to take part in so we took our harnesses off and went to the tree top net park. This is a whole area of nets up in the trees, with ramps to climb up to it and slides to get down – although two of the three slides were closed when we visited.

The net park is set up almost like rooms, with walkways in between. The rooms have space to bounce around and enjoy the freedom of being suspended between the trees. But, Little Man’s favourite part was the giant inflated balls that you could roll, throw and bounce around on top of. This was great fun!

Zip Lines

It was then time to do the zip line trail! For this you have to get harnessed back up again – and if we’d realised it was the same harnesses you used we would have probably stayed harnessed up and gone to the zip lines before taking them off for the net park.

It took us a while to get harnesses back on as staff seemed to be quite stretched between activities and they had trouble finding enough harnesses. But, when we were ready to go on the zip line course, we had to complete a practice course before going on the main one. This took quite a while as we had to wait for everyone to complete the practice course before moving on to the full course.

We then had to wait for someone to be helped off the course before we could start. This took quite a while but, we were then attached to the course and on our way.

The zip line trail is so much bigger than the standard high ropes course zip lines. They are high, long and fast. We found that we really needed our helmets for the zip lines as the landings are fierce – we banged our heads often and found we went so quickly that it was often hard to slow down and stop nicely on the platforms. This was something you got used to over the course of the trail but certainly not for the fainthearted!

One thing we loved about the zip line trek was that you went in pairs. It’s a dual format so two people could zip at once and we loved zooming along as a pair and then waiting for the others to join us. But, we did have a couple of kids behind us who weren’t following the rules – not waiting for us to cross before they started crossing etc and there weren’t very many staff around supervising like there had been on the high ropes course. This meant people could really do what they wanted with no real comeuppance.

Speed Slides

The last two activities at Gripped, Speed Slides and Bag Jumps don’t open until after 2pm in the afternoon. This does mean that by the time they open everyone has done the other activities and so the slides and bag jumps are really busy.

Dave and LP both went on the Speed Slides but did have to queue for about half an hour to go on them. There are two slides to choose from and you sit in a bag to slide. There’s a staff member at the top to keep everything safe and they both loved that there were windows along the slides so you could see flashes of the outside as you went along.

The site is open air and all weather but there isn’t a huge amount of shade so by the time they’d been on the slides we were done for the day and ready to go home. Because of this, we didn’t have the energy to queue again for the bag jumps but it did look fun – platforms at various heights that you can jump off onto a big inflated bag without any harnesses or wires! The people that we saw jump were having a great time.

The only other thing we found difficult at Gripped was the staff. The vast majority were very young, they didn’t really engage with customers and spent a lot of their time milling around or chatting with their mates. There was a manager, a lovely woman on reception and the health and safety guy who saved people on the courses that were all engaged and were doing a great job but literally everyone else we came across did not really seem to care at all. It was such a shame as they could be giving the job so much more.

That said, we felt safe throughout our trip, our harnesses were all fitted competently and we had a great time. But, some more direction would have been great – letting people know to keep their harnesses on and go to the zip lines after the high ropes course would be a good place to start!

Why visit Gripped?

We loved our visit to Gripped London and it was a great family day out. But, it would also be a great birthday party activity, a team building activity or a way of getting all your friends or family together, doing something different.

When we visited there were also two school trips – despite it being a weekend – and the students were clearly having a great time! LP has also been to Gripped on a school trip previously and it seems to be really popular with teenagers.

We had a really good day at Gripped and it was the perfect way to celebrate Little Man’s birthday. Although we had a few niggles, it’s somewhere we would definitely visit again in the future – and can’t wait to give the harder high ropes course a try!

You can see the latest Groupon Gripped offers here and you can find out more about Gripped over on their website. For reference, the address is: Staines Rd, Hounslow TW14 0HH. We’ve also shared a video of our trip over on instagram.