Selfie at the Medway Hulks.

Day trip to Rochester today. It's the Rochester Dickensian Christmas Festival this weekend, but I went to meet up with a friend. Neither of us are Christmas fanatics, so we went to see Eastgate House, and the wonderful Guildhall Museum. The latter has an exhibition of the Medway Hulks where Napoleonic prisoners of war were detained for many years in terrible conditions.

The Dickens connection is prominent: (from Wiki)

"The town was for many years the favourite of Charles Dickens, who lived nearby at Gads Hill Place, Higham, and who based many of his novels in the area. Descriptions of the town appear in Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations and (lightly fictionalised as "Cloisterham") in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Elements of two houses in Rochester, Satis House and Restoration House, are used for Miss Havisham's house in Great Expectations, Satis House.

The association with Dickens is the theme for Rochester's two Dickens festivals held annually in June and December.
The 16th-century red-brick Eastgate House once housed the town's museum. In the 1980s the museum was moved further west to the Guildhall so that Eastgate House could become the Charles Dickens Centre.

In the same decade the High Street was redecorated with Victorian-style street lights and hanging flower-baskets to give it a more welcoming atmosphere.

The Dickens Centre was ultimately unprofitable and shut in November 2004. Medway Council's Cabinet agreed proposals for the restoration and development of Eastgate House as a major cultural and tourist facility, and for the project to be recognised as a key cultural regeneration project on 7 November 2006."

Better large.