Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
sentencebysentence,inyourbrain.Takentogether,hisbooksadduptoperhapsthemostdis-
tinctively
living
literaryworldevercreated.Thechancetopay$20towalkthroughalovingly
produced three-dimensional version of that world seemed (despite some nagging highbrow
reservations) impossible to pass up.
And so I went to Dickens World. This was April 2007: the best of times. The global eco-
nomy was booming. The county of Kent, where the park is, turned out to be the kind of
verdant paradise I'd only read about in Romantic poetry: wooded hills, chalk cliffs, and that
classically deep,soft,greenEnglishgrasspunctuatedbyhugespreadsofyellowflowers,like
somebureaucraticdeityhadgoneoverallthevalleyswithagianthighlighter.Eventhecityof
Chatham—Dickens's childhood home, which had fallen on hard times—seemed to be com-
ing up in the world. The city's formerly derelict dockyards, where Dickens's father worked,
and where Dickens World was opening, were suddenly covered with cranes, the sign of a
thousand real estate projects blooming. It was a time of investment, development, fortune,
progress, joy—and Dickens World seemed to be at the heart of it.
The only problem was that Dickens World didn't open as planned.
Shortly before I arrived in Chatham, the park's website announced (with all the sunny
bluster ofa Dickens politician) that it was “proud” to report that, instead ofholding a ribbon-
cutting ceremony as scheduled, its opening would be delayed for a month and a half. Instead
of a functional attraction, I found a vaguely Dickensian construction site. The park is housed
inside a big blue warehouse, and when I got there, teams of workers were filling all of its
pseudo-19th-centurynookswithlitterandnoiseandtattoosandMohawksandsexualnovelty
T-shirts (
Excellent Growth Potential
) and aggressive handwritten signs. (One of them, taped
to a cinderblock wall, read,
NICK MY TOOLS, AND I'LL PUT A CHISEL IN YOUR THROAT
.) I got
a tour from the park's manager, who was wearing a hardhat and a reflective vest. He told me
I couldn't go on the Great Expectations boat ride because it was being repaired. (A worker
latertoldmethatithadbrokendownduringagalacelebrationthedaybefore,forcingtheloc-
alVIPs,hesaid,toputonbigrubberbootsandwadeoutthroughthewatertrough.)Icouldn't
go into the haunted house, he said, because technicians were using special welding torches
that might burn out my eyes. There was a red tractor working outside a miniature version of
Newgate Prison. Extension cords squiggled all over the imitation cobblestones. Everything
smelled powerfully like sawdust.
It was fascinating to watch. The laborers had been hired to do basically the opposite of
a typical construction job. They were building squalor—making new things look old, clean
things look filthy, dry things look wet, solid things look rotten. A worker named Phil ex-
plained to me some of the park's technical aspects. The ivy was silk. The trees were poly-
urethane cores surrounded by sculptured plaster. The cobblestones were made from a latex
moldofactualcobblestones.Themosswasamixtureofsawdust,glue,andgreenpaint—you
stirred it in a bucket and flung it on the walls. The bricks were casting plaster that had been
