Inside simulated London

A man waits for a bus on a quiet street, a spotless thoroughfare where the light never dims and the public transport always arrives on time. Close by, a couple browse the isles of a busy supermarket — a vast, multi-storied emporium where the shelves are always stacked and money is not accepted.

This might, especially to those used to the daily holdups and inflated surcharges of the nation’s capital, look like some kind of vision of a faraway future. Yet in a fairly unremarkable part of Dagenham, almost at the end of the District line, a level of civic harmony and social co-operation has emerged that could even be called utopian.

While this may look like paradise, or at least a close approximation, all is not as it seems. In fact, everything here is fake, as unreal as the plastic hedgerows and plywood fences of a child’s train set. What the people of Dagenham have on their doorstep is not an ideal cityscape, as welcome as that might be, but a state-of-the-art facility — a one-of-a-kind laboratory in which almost any urban feature can be recreated with alarming precision. Welcome to UCL's Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL).

Here, true-to-scale working models of the urban realm, from bus stops and tube carriages to supermarkets and hospital wards, are simulated and tested under controlled conditions to ensure that they meet rigorous standards of accessibility and user comfort. It's a uniquely designed, controlled environment where virtually any atmospheric condition can be replicated in immersive detail, whether sunlight, fog, dusk or thunderstorm.