Hale, an aero engineer who would later receive the MBE for services to aviation heritage, opened Cornwall Aero Park in 1976 with an inventory that read like a flight-museum brochure: model aircraft, period exhibitions, the Concorde flight deck the British Aircraft Corporation had built to position the highly complex instrument and seating layouts before the real Concorde fuselages were assembled. He acquired the cockpit of an Avro Shackleton maritime patrol aircraft, the long-nosed RAF veteran of Cold War coastal reconnaissance. He celebrated the Cornish pioneer aviator Richard Pearse, son of Cornish parents emigrated to New Zealand, who some claim made a powered flight in 1903, a year ahead of the Wright Brothers, and the Australian airman Charles Kingsford Smith, who flew the first Australia-to-England route in 1929. The aviation gallery was the founding identity of the park.

In 1979 Mrs Audrey Kingsford-Hale, looking at three empty rooms in the indoor hall, decided to recreate Victorian shop interiors at life size. The village grew over the following decades into fifty separate shops, cottages, and trade workshops: a butcher, a baker, a blacksmith, a chemist, a sweet shop, a public house, all furnished with period stock and lit at gaslight intensity. The chemist's shop was real. William White's shop in South Petherton, Somerset, had been closed and locked in 1909 and forgotten for seventy years; when it was rediscovered and sold at auction, Douglas Kingsford Hale bought the entire contents over the phone, sight unseen. Every item was numbered before removal and re-assembled at Flambards exactly as it had been in 1909. In 1984 Audrey opened a companion exhibition, Britain in the Blitz, a full-scale mock-up of a London street after a bombing raid — the wrecked tobacconist, the smoking front of a butcher's shop, the broken double-decker bus, a recorded soundscape of sirens and Vera Lynn. Dame Vera Lynn herself opened the exhibition. By 1990 the park had been renamed The Flambards Experience and the rides had started arriving.

Roller coasters and Cornish weather rarely make the most natural alliance, but Flambards persisted. The Dragon Coaster, the Canyon River Log Flume, the Hornet Coaster, and the Cornish Mine Train were added one season at a time. In 2010 the Skyraker 001 opened as Britain's first twisting drop tower. The park was renamed Flambards Theme Park. In 2013 Livingston Leisure took it over from the Kingsford-Hale family. The 2010s brought Jurassic Journey — a five-metre brachiosaurus, a T-Rex, and a triceratops nodding in animatronic loops between the aviation displays. The HUSS Frisbee from the defunct Pleasure Island in Lincolnshire arrived in 2017 and was renamed SkyForce. In 2024 a waltzer called ThunderDome opened to launch the season. Then in June, with no public warning, four major thrill rides were pulled out of service at once: Thunderbolt, Sky Swinger, SkyForce, and Hornet Coaster. The entry price dropped. SkyForce came back in August after a motor was replaced. On Monday 4 November 2024 the park announced its immediate and permanent closure after forty-eight years.

Lay's Auctioneers of Penzance took the catalogue in December 2024 and began sorting Flambards into lots. The complete sale catalogue was unveiled on 21 February 2025: most of the indoor exhibitions, the Victorian Village in its entirety, the Britain in the Blitz street with all its painstakingly aged props, the Concorde flight deck, the Shackleton cockpit, the War Gallery's tribute to the men and women of two world wars, even the Memory Lane wedding dresses — including one made during the war from a parachute, with stitch marks visible where successive brides had refitted the same fabric. On 13 March, two weeks before the main sale, Lay's announced that the entire Victorian Village had been bought as a single lot by Kynren, the County Durham historical pageant company, which plans to relocate and reopen it in a new show in 2026. The remaining 700 lots sold on 26 and 27 March 2025. The rollercoasters had already gone individually to touring fair operators — Thunderbolt, debuted by Evan Moran Jr at the Normanton Gala in September 2024 under a new name, Reactor: The Institute of Power. The pirate-themed play area went to Camel Creek. The shooting gallery went to Calloose Holiday Park.

Ferdi's Indoor Funland reopened as a standalone children's play attraction on 17 November 2024, two weeks after the park's death, and is now the sole operating remnant on the brownfield site. The future of the rest of the ground above Helston is undecided; planning permission for housing or retail has not yet been pursued. The grief, in Cornwall, has been quiet and specific. Two generations of west Cornish families had their summer days here. The Kingsford-Hale collections — the Concorde tooling deck, the Shackleton cockpit, the William White chemist's shop intact since 1909, the Victorian Village reassembled from a thousand antique fittings — are scattered now, mostly preserved, partly relocated, partly auctioned to private buyers whose names did not appear in the catalogue. The aviation pioneers of Cornish blood whose stories Douglas Hale curated for forty-eight years remain, in their own museums elsewhere. The brachiosaurus, last reported, is at the Trengilly Wartha Inn in Constantine.