What the Dickens is going on here?

Bleak houses: Dickens World in Chatham opens this month

Authentic: the 'Nicholas Nickleby' schoolroom

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It is dark, dirty and smelly, full of thieves, ghosts, murderers and really rather unpleasant schoolmasters. But then that's Charles Dickens for you.

This month a visitor attraction devoted to the life and works of the author will open at a £62million complex in what was once the Royal Naval Dockyard in Chatham, Kent.

Dickens World is close to where he was brought up - his father worked at the dockyard. But its heart is a painstakingly recreated Victorian London, from the cramped streets to Newgate Prison to the city waterways of Oliver Twist.

Attractions include a boat ride the operators claim is the longest of its kind in Europe, and a haunted house featuring the various Christmas ghosts as well as Ebenezer Scrooge.

Escaped convict Magwitch is there with his chilling warning, "You ain't seen me!" And there is a Fagin's den, though it is now a children's soft play area.

No effort has been spared to make the experience as 'orrible as Dickensian London. When the project was launched by Kevin Christie, the International Dickens Fellowship was called in to ensure authenticity. The result looks good.

Newgate Prison's walls are cracked and peeling, the river is a dirty brown - and the smells are as rank as anything the writer had to endure. As Dickens World manager Ross Hutchins said: "The smell here is horribly pungent."

The rickety buildings and walkways of Fagin's Creek convince. It is easy to imagine the winch over the boat ride being the one Bill Sikes used as he tried to escape the police in Oliver Twist. The schoolroom, with its wooden desks, inkwells and homilies to "Respect Thy Elders", could easily pass for Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby - except the desks then did not have interactive screens.

There is also a 20-minute Victorian musical with animatronic performers.

Mr Christie said purists would have no cause to complain: "Dickens was not a purist, he was a populist. He wrote stories serialised for newspapers. If he were alive he would be writing for TV. I think he would have loved this."

The project is also key to the regeneration of one of the most depressed parts of the South-East. When the dockyards closed in 1984, more than 7,000 jobs were lost. Since then millions of pounds have been poured into the area.

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