Museums

Novelty Automation

Tim Hunkin's handmade satirical arcade in a Holborn shopfront: nuclear reactors, divorces and the housing ladder, played with tokens.

Tim Hunkin draws cartoons, builds machines and has spent forty years making amusement arcade games about the things that are not amusing; his first arcade is on Southwold pier and this one, opened in Princeton Street in 2015, is the London branch. You buy tokens at the desk and put them in the slots. The Housing Ladder has you walk a treadmill of steps to move a little figure up towards a home it never reaches; the Small Hadron Collider, the Frisker, an instant divorce, Test Your Nerve and a booth that photographs your expressions were all made by hand in his workshop, with the mechanisms on show. It is a museum of the London arcade tradition, from the laughing sailor onwards, disguised as a place to waste an hour, and it is very funny.

Where

1a Princeton Street, WC1R 4AX

Nearest station

Holborn · 4 min walk

Hours

NearbyMuseums

• Sir John Soane's Museum4 min walk
• Charles Dickens Museum5 min walk
• Pushkin House6 min walk

NearbyOther Categories

• Conway HallPerformance venues1 min walk
• Sun Yat-senThe World in London3 min walk
• Lamb's Conduit StreetBeautiful Streets3 min walk

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