Lying at the mouth of the River Medway just 31 miles from London, Chatham was at one time an important naval base after Henry VIII turned a sleepy fishing village into a major dockyard, much of which is now open to the public. Many hundreds of Royal Navy ships, including Nelson’s HMS Victory, were built here. Visitors can travel through 400 years of maritime history at the Museum of the Royal Dockyard and journey to Fort Amherst and its complex of tunnels showing how soldiers of the Napoleonic era lived and fought. The Royal Engineers Museum is one of Britain’s foremost military museums, with 6,000 items, including Wellington’s map of Waterloo. Charles Dickens lived in Chatham as a boy from 1817 to 1821 when his father worked in the naval pay office.