London Dungeon Tours
- The London Dungeon takes visitors through dark events of London's past.man shout image by ftelkov from Fotolia.com
In business since 1976, the London Dungeon is an interactive museum and popular tourist attraction operated by Merlin Entertainments. Tours last approximately 90 minutes as groups are guided by actors through frightening re-enactments of some of the darker events in London's history.
The London Dungeon
28-34 Tooley St.
London SE1 2SZ
+44-207-403-7221
the-dungeons.co.uk - This newest attraction in the tour features the 16th-century Catholic monarch, Queen Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII. She was nicknamed Bloody Mary due to the fact that she burned several hundred people for the crime of heresy during her reign. Visitors witness Bloody Mary pass judgment on the heretics in her chambers, and special effects recreate the scene of these poor souls being slowly burnt alive.
- On this part of the tour, visitors are sentenced to death by an 18th-century judge and taken on a boat ride towards the Tower. In total darkness, they ride through Traitor's Gate and into the very bowels of the Dungeon.
- The Extremis is another tour ride during which visitors are taken from a cell in Newgate Prison to be hanged. Participants sit back to back in the ride, nooses drop, and after judgment, a trapdoor opens, and they are dropped 15 feet in a simulation of a hanging.
- Participants are transported back in time to September 2, 1666, the year of the Great Fire in London during which approximately 80 churches and 13,000 houses were lost. The city had been suffering from an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague for a year already, and the fire seemed to stem the disease by killing many of the rats and fleas that carried it. During this part of the tour, visitors experience the heat, smoke and chaos of the fire as it ravaged the streets of the city.
- In 1888, the brutal murder and mutilation of five women in London's Whitechapel area terrified all of London. This part of the tour retraces the steps of the perpetrator of these crimes, Jack the Ripper, in graphic detail.
- This section of the tour takes visitors to the 18th century, past Mrs. Lovett's pie shop and into the barber shop of the "Demon Barber of Fleet Street", Sweeney Todd. Although his actual existence is disputed by some, with the aid of a revolving barber's chair that catapulted victims into the cellar, he apparently robbed and cut the throats of his victims before giving the bodies to Mrs. Lovett to use in her meat pies. Visitors on this section of the tour are seated in animatronic chairs designed to make them feel as if they are sitting in Sweeney's barber chair.
- During this part of the tour, visitors are taken to the operating room of an 18th-century butcher-surgeon that features all the gory, unhygienic props one could imagine to ensure the highest dramatic effect. Without the benefit of anesthetic, procedures such as bloodletting and trepanning are carried out on unfortunate patients who are strapped to a chair.
Although some of the features of the tour are somewhat comedic (for example, participants may be charged with the crime of "having an ugly girlfriend"), a tour of the London Dungeon is still not for the faint of heart.
