London offers horror along with the history.
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LIKE MOST 12-year-olds, my son would prefer to visit London in cyberspace. The plane journey there would take 2.6 seconds and the Tower of London and Madame Tussauds would be interactive games in which the loser would face an axe wielding executioner or melt into a sticky puddle of wax.
I took him anyway.
But to make the most of our mid-winter trip, I figured it was pointless to drag him around a string of dusty museums in the hope some sense of history might sink in. If he was to remember any of it, it would have to scare the bejabbers out of him.
The beauty of London, of course, is that truth is uglier than fiction. No need to make up any of this stuff, from the murderous medieval misfits masquerading as kings, queens and noblemen, to the equally appalling deeds of the Jack the Rippers and Sweeney Todds. This place has it all. Fire, plague, torture, persecution and war. What more could a kid want?
And so the horror itinerary was born. Starting with Tussauds Chamber of Horrors and Scream!, followed by the London Dungeon, a trip to an allegedly haunted hospital operating theatre, a day at the Tower of London and an afternoon at Gunther von Hagen's acclaimed Body Worlds exhibition.
It was perfect. Grisly, spooky, scary, gross and, hopefully, memorable. This wouldn't work for younger kids, of course, but for jaded pre-teens who think they've seen it all, it's just the ticket.
Day one: Madame Tussauds. You can't leave London without visiting Tussauds, just around the corner from the Baker St made famous by Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. I'd avoided the Chamber of Horrors and its Scream! on my last trip sans child, but there was no escaping it this time. Seeing horrifically real electrocutions, tortured prisoners and mass murderers is one thing but you will perform your own danse macabre in the dark as serial killers leap from prison cells to hiss and flap in your face.
Fortunately there are rules - the actors won't touch you and you don't touch them. I clutched the 12-year-old and we screamed like banshees until we were hoarse. Delicious.
The Spirit of London waterborne "black cab" ride at the end of the visit reminds us that the country which produced Jack the Ripper and Dennis Nilsen also gave us Shakespeare and Drake.
Day two: Morning: London Dungeon, Tooley St (just 100m from London Bridge Underground station on the Northern and Jubilee lines). If you choose just one horror experience for the kids in London, make this it. Actors bring history to life in an interactive exhibition as funny as it is spooky. Sit in the barber's chair at Sweeney Todd's in Fleet St and feel the razor whisper past the back of your neck before your seat jolts back to deposit your body in the cellar before it's chopped up for Mrs Lovett's pies. See live rats scurrying behind the glass in the walls. Watch as Jack the Ripper disembowels another hooker. Stand in the dock and be sentenced to death (I was charged with naked dancing and ordered to be burned at the stake. The judge accepted a plea of insanity when he heard I was from New Zealand). Take a boat ride through Traitor's Gate at the Tower of London and drop from the gallows at Newgate Prison. The 12-year-old reckoned the drop was better than Fear Fall at Rainbows End. Again, not for the very young or the fainthearted.
Afternoon: The Garret/Old Operating Theatre, 9a St Thomas's St. Just around the corner from the Dungeon, and up a narrow spiral staircase on the site of the famous St Thomas's Hospital in Southwark, it's meant to be haunted by the ghost of Florence Nightingale, who set up a nursing school there.
We didn't see her and it was just as well. After the Dungeon our nerves were shot. The most horrifying exhibits were the veterinary-sized implements of birth and amputation. Probably of most interest to those fascinated by things medical.
Day three: Tower of London. The little Princes Edward V and Richard Duke of York may have been murdered here in 1483 and Anne Boleyn, Jane Grey and Catherine Howard were among many beheaded here in the 1500s. But all the 12-year-old can remember of the Tower is being roundly told off by a thundering Beefeater for making a peace sign as he posed for a photograph. The moral? This MIGHT BE England's most-visited tourist attraction but it's still a palace of the reigning monarch and woe betide the tourist who doesn't behave accordingly. A modern-day reminder that people have lost their heads for less. And of the uneasy alliance of past and present at the site: view the Crown Jewels which have been at the Tower since the 17th Century as you glide past on a travelator. Walk five minutes from the green where Anne Boleyn was beheaded and pick up your lunch at Subway or Wagamama on Tower Hill.
Day four: Ripley's Believe it or Not! Museum, Trocadero, Picadilly Circus. If your kids have ever pored over the books of the world's tallest, fattest, shortest, hairiest and ugliest, the Odditorium, which opened at the Troc last August, is for them. From the grotesque (the two-headed lamb and calf) to the genuinely gob-smacking (the royal family tableau made from varnished ants - I'm serious - and Princess Diana fashioned from clothes dryer lint). There's also a fine line in inventive torture devices from China or Mongolia, which prove the medieval Brits didn't entirely corner the market.
Day five: Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds and Mirror of Time exhibition at the O2 bubble, Greenwich. The latest in the Body Worlds exhibitions which have already been seen by 26 million people, the Mirror of Time will be on show until August 21. Featuring real skinless bodies preserved with van Hagens' plastination process, this show can seem both voyeuristic and seriously sick. The Mirror of Time focuses on life cycles and ageing and while the adults found it remarkable and compelling, the 12-year-old thought it was the most horrifying thing he'd ever seen. Von Hagens genius or ghoul? The jury is still out.
Because we visited London in mid-winter, during one of the coldest snaps in 13 years (temperatures fell to -12C and in Dorset, an 800m stretch of sea along the shoreline froze over), we didn't do the night-time walks that London is famous for.
In summer, we would have chosen Donald Rumbelow's Jack the Ripper tour or Nick or Shaughan's Haunted London tour. Rumbelow, a former London copper, is an internationally recognised Ripper authority. If you're choosing a walk, make sure you pick one run by a Blue Badge-registered guide and not a fly-by-nighter.
We did, however, do the one thing a London winter is made for: outdoor ice skating. There are a number of venues around town, but none more beautiful than the 18th Century courtyard of the historic Somerset House on the Strand. Do a night session under lights and try it even if you're hopeless. The kids will be sailing around effortlessly within five minutes and you'll be clinging helplessly to the safety barrier or sitting on your bum. Tickets for a one-hour night session cost 12.50 for adults and 8 for kids. If you're a novice you'll be black and blue by the end of the hour but you won't have laughed more. And you can thaw out with a mulled wine afterwards.
* Donna Chisholm travelled to London courtesy of Emirates.
