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The Most Unlikely Theme Park: Charles Dicken’s Dickens World

Yes, it’s real …

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/02/12/magazine/12dickensworld_span/mag-12Dickensworld-t_CA1-articleLarge.jpg

“It promised to be an “authentic” re-creation of the London of Charles Dickens’s novels, complete with soot, pickpockets, cobblestones, gas lamps, animatronic Dickens characters and strategically placed chemical “smell pots” that would, when heated, emit odors of offal and rotting cabbage. Its centerpiece was the Great Expectations boat ride, which started in a rat-infested creek, flew over the Thames, snaked through a graveyard and splashed into a sewer. Its staff had all been trained in Victorian accents and body language. Visitors could sit at a wooden desk and get berated by an angry Victorian schoolteacher, watch Dickensian holograms antagonize one another in a haunted house or set their kids loose in a rainbow-colored play area called, ominously, Fagin’s Den, after the filthy kidnapper from “Oliver Twist.”

Sadly, with the poor economy, things are not going well but the Pizza Hut is open. You can read the rest at the NY Times.

Or the park here.

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6 April 2012 History 3 Comments

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