Growing up in Michigan at exactly the right time in history, I was one of the misfortunate few to actually visit AutoWorld during its short, pointless existence. Since then, bizarre theme parks have been a mini-obsession and Chatham, England’s Dickens World certainly fits the bill.
Sam Anderson wrote a nice piece for the New York Times on the many travails of bringing Dickens World vision to fruition,
It promised [for its planned 2007 opening] 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.” The park’s operating budget was $124 million.
Alas, the park was hit by the same economic downturn the rest of us experienced and its opening was delayed and many of the ambitious plans it had were never actually completed. Visiting the park 5 years after its opening, Anderson does find one thing that would have made my visit to Autoworld a lot more interesting if only Six Flags had gone a different route with it,
For a park that markets itself to children, Dickens World was surprisingly grisly. I saw at least two severed heads, and when the performers lip-synched their way through a dramatization of “Oliver Twist” in the courtyard, it ended as the novel ends: with Bill Sikes murdering Nancy by beating her head in with a club, then being chased by a mob until he accidentally hangs himself. The violence was suggested rather than shown, but still — I flinched slightly for the kids who had been pulled in from the audience to play orphans. The gruesomeness was admirable, in a way: you wouldn’t want Dickens World to exclude the darker side of things — that would be a misrepresentation. But it made me wonder, again, if the idea of this place really made sense.
Oh, hell yeah.