I've been geeking out looking at the "bird's eye" feature in Bing Maps - just about the only reason to use Bing over Google!
The website is here:
https://www.bing.com/maps/ . Just navigate/search for the area and right click and select "View bird's eye". There are 4 viewing angles for most of them which are worth exploring. It's only available in certain areas though - so a lot of parks don't feature.
I remember looking at these when I was a teenager (it was called Live Maps back then), and the UK imagery doesn't seem to have been updated much since then, giving us some great historic shots.
Let's start at the Pleasure Beach:
See how many changes you can spot! It's before the addition of the Dancing Fountain, but after the removal of Spin Doctor so I recokon that puts it between 2006 and 2009.
Here's Thorpe Park. The Flying Fish is in its new location but Saw is not yet built, making this 2007-2008:
Down at Margate, the Scenic Railway stands intact complete with a rather sorry looking fairground, putting it around the time of my first visit in 2006, just before it closed.
Over in Wales, you can still see Ocean Beach Amusement Park in Rhyl which was razed in 2007:
Down at Folkestone, the Runaway Coaster stands alone awaiting its fate:
I still feel absolutely gutted that this ride wasn't saved - there must have been hundreds of Fig-8 coasters like this at one time and this was one of only two survivors before it was flattened in 2007. Did anyone here get to ride this one?
Here's Clarence Pier with the old Skyways coaster which Mr Bean rode:
Over to Cleethorpes now, and a nice view of the former Pleasure Island before it closed in 2016.
One of the saddest sights now, with Pleasureland Southport somehow looking even worse than it does now:
This looks to me like fairly soon after the old park was demolished; before the Haunted Inn and River Caves burned down, so probably around 2007.
One of the old images I have saved on my PC which I think is from Live maps shows the original park, which I was lucky enough to visit in 2006:
Up at Morecambe, the Polo tower and log flume still stand at Frontierland:
The Polo Tower stood for 17 years after the park closed before finally being demolished in 2017, I think it was left because of some radio hardware that was still in use. Does anyone know whay the log flume was left for so long? As far as I can tell it's still there.
One final UK park - Codona's in Aberdeen in its "heyday" before selling both larger coasters. I did wander there once but everything was closed.
Elsewhere there's some great imagery of parks in the US, but it seems to be much more up-to-date that the UK stuff. I haven't found much in Europe except for the 3 big Spanish Parks.
Here's how Dragon khan looked before it got dwarfed:
Let's take a minute to appreciate how good Stampida looks from the air:
Parque Warner Madrid has some good shots too but the park never adds anything new so there's no way of knowing the year! The only change I could tell is that the waterpark is missing:
Here are the big guns at Parque de Atracciones de Madrid:
I hope you enjoyed that output of several mis-spent hours of my life! If you enjoy aeriel images then it's definitely worth having a look yourself, let me know if I missed any good ones!