China's £500m fake English town remains eerily deserted

A copycat British town in China, complete with red telephone boxes and a Gothic church, remains so deserted it has been dubbed the real-life Truman Show.

The reportedly £500m creation, called Thames Town, sits 19 miles outside of Shanghai and despite being completed in 2006, its mock-Tudor buildings and cobbled streets remain desolate.

Its main visitors are middle-class newlyweds who pose for English-themed wedding snaps in the town.

On entering Thames Town you could be mistaken for thinking you had strolled into a quaint southern counties settlement, but on closer inspection many of the shops on the high street, with names like 'Mike's Records' and 'The Fish Bar', are empty, leading many foreign visitors to liken it to the hit film The Truman Show.

And it's not the only copycat town in China. In the southern Chinese province of Guangdong lies a replica of the Alpine village of Hallstatt in the Austrian Alps.

In Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, you can see a fake Eiffel Tower, which stands 108 metres tall.

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