Dickens World, Chatham

...to pay a visit to Dickens World, the South East’s newest tourist attraction, which opened recently in Chatham, Kent, home to Charles Dickens for many years. Nestling between the town’s Historic Dockyard and a somewhat less historic outlet shopping mall, Dickens World was opened to the public on 25th May, 2007, and all the advertising material we’d seen promised “the day out of a lifetime…with a host of captivating attractions” ...
...halt, and a couple of Dickens World staff members in period attire were despatched to pacify and entertain the waiting throng.

As we edged towards the entrance doors, a group of senior citizens, some in wheelchairs, others aided by walking-sticks, were led by an attendant to the front of the queue and through the entrance reserved for disabled visitors. “Artful Dodgers!” cried one wag in the crowd, while another remarked ... more

Stuck for something to do on a typically wet and miserable Bank Holiday, we decided to pay a visit to Dickens World, the South East’s newest tourist attraction, which opened recently in Chatham, Kent, home to Charles Dickens for many years. Nestling between the town’s Historic Dockyard and a somewhat less historic outlet shopping mall, Dickens World was opened to the public on 25th May, 2007, and all the advertising material we’d seen promised “the day out of a lifetime…with a host of captivating attractions” More accurately, perhaps, it’s a “day in”, since the complex is an indoor one, and taking the inclement weather into account, it seemed like an ideal place to spend the day.

~ Great Expectations ~

“Take a thrilling, chilling, fun packed journey around Dickensian England celebrating the life, work and times of Charles Dickens” enthuses the promotional leaflet, “and be entertained by a cast of live performers!” My sons were quite taken by the idea of a boat ride which would take in the sights of Dickensian London’s narrow, dingy, rat-infested streets and alleys before continuing on its journey through a Victorian sewer, while other attractions included The Haunted House of Ebenezer Scrooge, a “stunning 4D HD cinema show”, a Victorian schoolroom and a Dickensian shopping mall. A state-of-the-art animatronics show was mentioned too, along with a children’s play area entitled Fagin’s Den (presumably not intended to educate the little Olivers in the art of pocket-picking), and indeed, the whole concept sounded very promising. Would it live up to such Great Expectations, however?

The day got off to a bad start. Arriving just before 11 o’clock, an hour after opening time, we were surprised to see that the queue to get in stretched round to the back of the huge, hangar-sized building, although people seemed to be shuffling along at a reasonable pace, so we took our places at the back of the line. All went quite well until we reached the front of the building, when progress came to a sudden halt, and a couple of Dickens World staff members in period attire were despatched to pacify and entertain the waiting throng.

As we edged towards the entrance doors, a group of senior citizens, some in wheelchairs, others aided by walking-sticks, were led by an attendant to the front of the queue and through the entrance reserved for disabled visitors. “Artful Dodgers!” cried one wag in the crowd, while another remarked that we’d all be drawing our pensions by the time the rest of us got in. No race on earth queues with such grace and good humour as the British!

Finally inside after a two and a half hour wait, we learned that a combination of sheer numbers of visitors and the breakdown of the automated credit card processor was being blamed for the long delay; ah, the wonders of modern technology! Once past the ticket desk, we climbed a staircase leading to a series of darkened, bricked alleyways, chunks of brickwork missing, as though these corridors had stood for years instead of a mere few weeks, and we emerged at last onto a bridge across an authentically reproduced Victorian sewer, filled with an unspeakable, murky brown liquid. Ahead of us loomed a dimly-lit courtyard, surrounded by a thoughtfully-designed and well-constructed assortment of dilapidated wooden houses and Victorian shop fronts, together with a rabbit-run of narrow, grimy-looking alleys.

Several more stairways led to an upper tier of buildings, including a spit-and-sawdust-style alehouse, where it would have been no surprise to have seen Bill Sikes himself holding court amid a background of bawdy rabble and buxom serving-wenches bearing tankards of porter in the direction of a lewd and well-oiled clientele. The scene was impressive enough, and the excellently recreated Victorian slums were worthy of a film set. We liked what we had seen so far.

~ Bah, Humbug! ~

And that was when things began to go downhill. Our first stop was Peggotty’s Boathouse and while there was no sign of the doughty matron herself, we went inside and prepared to “be thrilled by the tales of Dickens’ foreign adventures in a stunning 4D HD cinema show”. In truth, the animation was a touch amateurish and while the narrative detailing Dickens’ travels across America was both interesting and informative, the 4D effects were decidedly unspectacular, a damp squib on this equally damp Bank Holiday Monday.

Disappointed but undeterred, we decided it was time to “fly across the rooftops of London, through streets and courtyards to the depths of the sewers”, otherwise known as the Great Expectations Boat Ride. Recovered by now from our chilly wait earlier in the day, we joined the queue for what looked to be the most popular attraction of all, and we wound our way through the tunnels and passageways of Newgate Prison, peering cautiously through the grilles into the cells, which were disappointingly empty, with not so much as a cobweb to tickle our noses.

It seemed that we were destined to spend our day in one queue or another, for suddenly, and without a word of explanation, the queue came to a compete standstill, where we remained for a further 45 minutes, until I and several others eventually gave up waiting and returned to the main courtyard. There we learned that modern-day gremlins had once again got into the works, bringing the boat ride to a temporary halt. Those faithful souls who remained incarcerated inside Newgate Prison for a further 30 minutes or so were able finally to board the ride, but as groups of people began to emerge from the bowels of the sewer, rumblings of discontent could be heard. The peasants had begun to revolt, and several were demanding their money back. Quite apart from the lengthy wait, the ride had, apparently, been something of an anti-climax, summed up by my younger son thus: “Mum, it was rubbish and I didn’t even get wet.” So much then, for the warning notices deterring those with nervous dispositions or heart complaints from taking the ride. Perhaps they were referring to the effects of the interminable wait rather than those of the ride itself.

~ A Rather Bleak House ~

I’d got talking to some fellow visitors while awaiting my family’s release from Newgate, and the general consensus was one of enormous disappointment, with each of us feeling that, like the Artful Dodger’s victims, we had had our pockets well and truly picked. In particular, it had cost our family of four a total of £40 to get in, and so far, we had seen very little to justify that expenditure. One lady, who lived locally, told me that she’d had a far better time at the Dickens festival in nearby Rochester just before Christmas, and another, on hearing that we planned to visit The Haunted House of Ebenezer Scrooge next, advised us not to bother, describing the experience as “one long corridor with three rooms full of nothing”.

She was correct to an extent; the three rooms were in fact large screens on which short films featuring various Dickens characters being introduced were shown repeatedly. One of the films had no sound, and none of them was the least bit enlightening about either Dickens’ work or his life. As for the ‘house’ itself, this indeed consisted of a long corridor constructed from plywood, and bore no resemblance at all to a house, haunted or otherwise. Quite what the organisers were thinking of here is a mystery, and we eventually came to the conclusion that the scenery-builders must have run out of time in the rush to complete the project before the complex was opened to the public. To describe the experience as a Haunted House is misleading and embarrassingly inappropriate, and I doubt that even the most sensitively-dispositioned souls would have batted an eyelid over it. Without doubt, this had to be the most disappointing aspect of the whole attraction.

With our sons feeling that they were too old to enter Fagin’s Den, the children’s play area, we were left with just one more place to go, which was the Victorian schoolroom. Both boys had been on a school visit to our local museum where they had spent the day in a Victorian schoolroom setting, and where a strict schoolmistress had rapped the desks with a ruler, inspected the children’s fingernails and castigated any child who dared to speak out of turn, and we expected to be subjected to a similar experience here. Sadly, there was none of it, with the twenty-something year old schoolmaster leaving us to our own devices, and making little effort to get into character. We spent about fifteen minutes playing an interactive snakes and ladders game (very un-Victorian, although I’m sure Dickens would have approved of keeping abreast with the times), in which we answered questions about the author’s life and works. Thank goodness we had been paying attention to the film we’d seen earlier in Peggotty’s Boathouse! The quiz proved to be one of the more interesting aspects of the day, but given a little more imagination and effort, the whole schoolroom experience could have been so much better.

~ Food, Glorious Food ~

By now, we were getting hungry, so we went to see what the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters restaurant had to offer. The menu was quite limited in fact, and at £5.95 for a light snack of mackerel pate on fingers of toast, and £7.95 for three sausages and a couple of scoops of mashed potato, we considered the food to be somewhat poor value for money. We could only wonder what Dickens would have made of lasagne and nachos as examples of traditional English food, but concluded that as a seasoned traveller, he might well have encountered such exotic fare during his excursions. Nevertheless, we opted to forgo a meal in the restaurant and since there was nothing left to see, we made our way downstairs to the exit, via the inevitable gift shop.

Strangely, the Old Curiosity Shoppe had a distinct twenty-first century look about it, and frankly, contained little to arouse the curiosity of even the most avid collector of overpriced tourist tat. I think the popularity of a tourist attraction can generally be gauged by the willingness of its visitors to spend even more money on souvenirs, and this little theory was borne out by the fact that most people didn’t even stop to browse the merchandise on offer, but made a swift exit from the building.

~ Please sir, can we have some more? ~

Looking back on the day, we felt quite cheated, and not just in the fiscal sense. Put simply, Dickens World had failed to live up to its own publicity, and had disappointed both adults and children alike. Some of the promised attractions hadn’t materialised, examples being the Dickensian Shopping Mall and the Britannia Theatre, where the animatronics show was supposed to take place, and it seemed that the publicists had been guilty of using a certain amount of literary licence in this respect. Leaving aside the technical problems, which are always likely to occur in any new venture, the enormous potential to make this an entertaining and educational “day out of a lifetime” had remained unfulfilled, which is a great shame. We neither expected, nor had any desire to see the ‘Disney-fication’ of Charles Dickens, but we couldn’t help feeling that the creativity and effort which had obviously gone into designing and constructing the scenery had been let down badly by the end product.

Generally speaking, £40 isn’t an unreasonable amount to pay in entrance fees for a family of four, and I wouldn’t normally baulk at such a sum had I felt that we’d been offered a reasonable amount of entertainment value in return. In this instance, however, I believe we were short-changed. The general impression was that the place had been opened too soon; the shopping mall didn’t exist, the theatre was closed, there were areas which appeared not to have been finished off, and the cast of live performers seemed to have missed out on the final rehearsals.

With a few exceptions, the cast was largely ineffective, and despite being dressed magnificently in period costume, many failed dismally to get into character, merging anonymously into the background or chatting with the uniformed members of staff. Others were woefully miscast – the young schoolmaster comes to mind – and while one young lady made a sterling effort to engage some children in Victorian street games, the characterisation was, on the whole, a pretty lacklustre and amateurish affair. I would have liked to have seen more street entertainers and maybe some mock-up scenes featuring some of the well known characters from the books; a little more imagination and application was all that was required.

I don’t know whether the disgruntled boat-people were successful in getting their money back, but I do hope that the management will have taken notice of the general feeling of discontent which was apparent on the day of our visit, because unless improvements are made quite quickly, I fear that Dickens World will sooner or later find itself falling on Hard Times. I sincerely hope that doesn’t happen.

Opening Times: 10am – 7pm (except Christmas Day)
Entry Prices: Adults: £12.50
Children: £ 7.50
Concessions: £9.50 (although the website states £10.50)

It seems that the ever-present gremlins managed to sabotage our photographs, which all turned out too dark to be of any use, but you can get some idea of the layout of Dickens World by logging on to the website: www.dickensworld.co.uk. 

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