The London Dungeon

Mark and I went to the London Dungeon on Saturday. There was a 2 for 1 admission offer in conjunction with Oyster card that was up at the end of March, and given the horrible weather of the last few weeks it seemed like a safe indoor bet for general amusement.

The Dungeon is just outside of the London Bridge tube/rail station, in some of the vault shaped areas underneath the elevated overground rail lines. The Southbank has quite a few of these elevated rails with old arched brick supports, and you sort of get the impression that they used to lie derelict or were the homes of scooter repair stores before the Southbank renaissance a few years ago. Southbank is also a very, very old part of London, formerly a separate city directly across the river from the 'City'/Square Mile. And as the City is a surreal form of unnaturally expensive real estate, Southbank has managed to find itself the home of a great many tourist attractions based on the fact that London is old and kind of creepy. London Dungeon is probably the leader of this pact, having been around since the 1970s or something ridiculous like that, and also includes the Clink Prison Museum, the newly opened London Bridge Experience and all those darkly inclined roving walking tours.

According to my sources (aka, wikipedia), the Dungeon was originally meant to be more of a museum of past London horrors, but has instead morphed into more of an interactive themed entertainment situation. Basically, after spending approximately 45 minutes waiting in line to get in, we waited in a few more lines, then a creepy man explained we were going to a scary place, we had to walk around a mirrored maze where everyone just shuttled behind the person in front of them, then we 'learned' about things such as the plague outbreak of 1665, the sorts of crimes that could get you hanged back in the day, the Great Fire of 1666 (I think in general terms, 1665/1666 was the worst possible time to be in London), Jack the Ripper, some torture devices, and then to top it off you go on a little ride where they pick you up and drop you, which is supposed to be reminiscent of being hung at Newgate Prison. Pictures of your descent are available in the adjacent room on your way to the gift shop. All of these enterprises involved real people in costumes and white make-up to make them look, well, I don't know, dead? We encountered one guy more than once who made Mark feel self-conscious because whenever he saw him he referred to him as 'the posh one'. Although to be fair this was more of a statement of the other people on the tour.

Having entered the actual doors of the venue around 12:15, we were finally released again at 2, so it was quite a lengthy amusement so you feel like you're getting something for your money. While I wouldn't recommend the venue to the more mature traveller, it is quite amusing in it's own way. If you were 10 you would find it quite scary, I think. After this, we bypassed the other nearby creepy tourist destinations in favor of everyone's favorite activity 'lunch'.