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The story that leads to your ride however, can be argued to start with your procession into one of London's old jails, where incarceration was only part of their reason for being - and brutal torture was the delight of many prison workers day.

A torturer is on hand to delicately explain some of the medieval torture devices. Using members of the group as guinea pigs, he demonstrates some devices such as Eyeball Gougers and Tounge Rippers - as well as a device that would make any male member of the group shudder. “Once, Twice, Three Times: A Lady...”

We are sent through to the court for trial and sentencing, and at this point the smut really starts to flow – rather disconcertingly for the family experience! Some of it is fairly humorous puns on words, some of it is just plain rude. Above us a line of judges considers members of the groups fate for such heinous crimes as pinching peoples bottoms, being far too friendly with horses (where the sentence dished out is to be the back end of a pantomime horse and then placed in a stable with 15 randy stallions and seeing how he liked it, I kid you not…) and living in Denmark.

Rather unfairly, the whole group is sentenced to death, and we are marched through some rotten corpses to the docks. The operator and generally nasty fellow supplied us with the rules and the consequences of us braking them whilst we wait for our boat to arrive to take us to our death. The boat seats 8 people in 4 rows of 2, with large headrests in case the damned feel uncomfortable. We are told that if we stand up the operator will break our legs, if we stay seated we will die. Hard choice actually.

The boat slips off into water, and winds through a dark passage. Although the light is dim, we can see many horrible sights as we wind through the Thames including hangman's nooses and various execution tools. We go up a dark lift, and at the top an executioner shouts at us all sorts of horrible things about how he is going to kill us and enjoy every moment of it. The boat swings to the right, trundles forward a bit, then swings back to the left and starts to move off backwards through the dimly lit TRAITORS GATE. The drop is very shallow and as we hit the bottom, some various flashing lights is concluded with what must be THE brightest on-ride camera flash ever. Ten seconds later, as we are still blinded from that flash, another member of staff creeps up on us out of the gloom and welcome us to Whitechapel - where we alight to discover more about Jack the Ripper.

It's very in-keeping with the rest of the London Dungeon's style. It is not intense enough that kids will hate every minute of it, though it is fair to say that not many young children will be processing around the Dungeon anyway. But it is fairly grim. The only criticism you can really have of the ride is that it is horrendously short. I appreciate that fitting such an attraction into the space constraints of the building is probably the reason why this is the case, rather then a desire to have it so short, but in some ways it detracts from the point of the ride because it doesn't have time to actually DO anything while you are in the boat.

The lead up to the lift is so dark that you can barely see any of the theming, and this may be a perfect opportunity to actually explain what Traitors Gate was - at no point is this revealed currently, which seems to be a stunning oversight. The top of the lift has the animatronic executioner which is all fine and dandy and injects at least a little bit of entertainment into the ride.

The drop is short and shallow, but it would be reckless to have anything else on a ride that the public have little choice on whether they ride or not. After the ride, apart from the blinding camera flash, again there is nothing to fill the (admittely very short) dead air before we are told to abandon ship.

But, lets not forget that the ride does not stand as an attraction on it's own merit - it is merely part of the whole London Dungeon expirience / attraction / walkthrough, or however you want to describe it. It's not worth visiting for the ride alone, but it is an extra point to add for the dungeon's marketting - though one still feels that even ignoring it's length and audience criteria, it still hasn't been utilised quite as much as it could have been.