Adventure Neverland

The Founder's Gallery

There is one room in the park with no ride, no queue and no music. Marble floor, green walls, three tall windows, and a bench for whoever needs to sit down. It is kept for the man who drew the island before any of it existed.

Stephen Wallis

He was not an engineer and he was not a showman. He was a man who believed a child should be able to walk through a door and come out somewhere better, and he kept saying it long enough that people began building it. Lantern Row was a pencil sketch on the back of a folded map for eleven years before a single lamp was lit on it.

Everything on this planet — the streets, the flights, the parks nobody is supposed to find — began as a sentence he refused to stop repeating: that the second star is real if you're willing to build it.

A gilded oil portrait of Stephen Wallis holding a rolled park plan — The commissioned portrait. The rolled plan in his hand is the first island drawing — the one with the lane running north to a clocktower.

A brass and glass case holding a pocket watch, pen, folded park plan, spectacles, key and a small star pin — What he carried: a watch that ran four minutes fast, his pen, the folded plan, his reading glasses, the first gate key, and a small brass star.

"Build it so that the smallest person in the room feels the tallest."

Stephen Wallis, Founder

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