A MUM who took her family to a Christmas theme park in Hampshire likened it to a “concentration camp”.

Anita Saunders took her whole family to Lapland New Forest because it was her son’s fifth birthday, she told a court.

Describing why she booked ten tickets, she told jurors: “It just sounded fantastic. It seemed magical. It seemed fantastic for the children.”

Mrs Saunders, from Lyndhurst, took her son, daughter, husband, her sister and husband, their two children, and her parents to the attraction at Matchams, near Ringwood.

When her family got inside the theme park, Mrs Saunders told of her shock.

“I think it was pretty much disbelief,”

she said. “I think when we walked through we were expecting to walk through something fantastic but we were bitterly disappointed.”

Asked about the tunnel of light, she said: “I imagined we would walk into a tunnel and come out of the tunnel into a magical Christmas village.

“The reality was that we joined a very large queue. There was nobody to direct us, so we just followed everybody else in front of us.”

Mrs Saunders, who later complained to Trading Standards, described the queues of people as something out of a movie set concentration camp.

Everyone was just shuffling around with their heads down,” she said. “The reality was that there were a few fir trees with coloured patio lights shining out from underneath them.”

Mrs Saunders said her family saw several howling husky dogs tethered in pens.

“We saw two reindeer. I have to say that one of the reindeer had a broken antler,” she told jurors.

Mrs Saunders said they then saw a long queue to see Santa and decided to go instead to the Polar Post Office, which she described as a “large B&Q shed”.

“Inside there were two teenage girls dressed as elves,” she said. “All we saw inside were broken pens, snapped crayons and envelopes.”

Mrs Saunders said she was very disappointed with the Gingerbread Cottage, which she said was another “B&Q shed”.

“They were giving out gingerbread men, taken out of a plastic packet, and a girl came along and spread some very watery icing over the gingerbread man and the children were given a small amount of Smarties or sweets to stick on the gingerbread man,” she said.

“We were given a plastic bag to put the gingerbread man in. By the time we left, the icing had run off and the sweets were just a gooey mess in the bottom of the bag.”

Mrs Saunders said her family went to another shed featuring Radio Lapland and asked for a birthday request for her son, but the DJ had played it before they had even left the shed and never heard it.

Mrs Saunders was among a string of parents describing their disappointment after taking their families to Lapland New Forest.

Jurors at Bristol Crown Court have heard that within days of the theme park opening in November 2008, hundreds of disgruntled visitors had complained to Trading Standards saying they had been ripped off.

Less than a week later the attraction closed as the company behind it, Lapland New Forest UK Ltd, went into liquidation, with the defendants blaming the media and sabotage from “New Forest villains”.

With customers charged £30 per ticket and with up to 10,000 advance bookings online, the owners – brothers Victor and Henry Mears – were set to take £1.2m in ticket sales. The brothers face five charges of engaging in a commercial practice which is a misleading action and three charges of engaging in a commercial practice which is a misleading omission. Victor Mears, 67, and Henry Mears, 60, both of Brighton, deny all the charges.

Proceeding