THE main ski slope at the new North Star leisure complex will be among the longest in the UK, it has been revealed.

After years of false starts and broken promises, an ambitious vision for a leisure destination that many people feared would never materialise is beginning to take shape.

In July, Swindon Borough Council announced that a £270m deal had been finalised with experienced developers Seven Capital. It was a breakthrough that breathed new life into the project which, just months earlier, had looked almost certain to fail.

Since then, work has been under way to establish what the future will look like for the North Star site and now, for the first time, details are beginning to emerge. When an outline planning application is submitted in the coming weeks, it will include a long list of exciting elements.

Among them will be two ski slopes — a main slope that will be 170m in length and a second ‘nursery slope’ at 75m. Boasting real snow, the indoor skiing complex will be 170,000 sq ft in size.

Also on the site will be a 13 screen cinema and a 26,000 sq ft 10-pin bowling venue. Specialist sporting retail outlets are envisaged alongside restaurants.

Additional parking with space for 750 cars — in addition to the existing car park at the Oasis — is also on the cards.

A hotel with between 100 and 150 bedrooms will be built at the entrance to the site.

Garry Perkins, the cabinet member responsible for delivering the project, has praised the council’s new partners for their determination so far.

“Everything they’ve promised so far, they’ve done,” he said.

“They’ll be going in for outline planning before Christmas and they’re still looking at detailed planning by Easter next year.

“Next month they will be starting on a six-month refurbishment of the Oasis. New boilers, new equipment, they’re looking at the whole fabric of the place.”

One element of the original vision that will not feature in the planning application is a new arena. Traffic modelling required to show how the road network around the site would cope with a maximum capacity event has proven to be a stumbling block in the past and planning consent could not be granted without it.

Coun Perkins said that in a bid to “get things moving as quickly as possible”, the arena had been left out of the first phase of the project but was still on the table as a possible future project.