Science & Engineering

The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.

Kirkaldy Testing Museum

One enormous Victorian testing machine, in the building David Kirkaldy put up around it, under the words FACTS NOT OPINIONS.

MuseumsEngines & pumpingOpen days onlyGo inside

The front of Kirkaldy's Testing Works on Southwark Street, seen from the pavement: four storeys of yellow London brick with arched windows, the words Kirkaldy's Testing & Experimenting Works cut into a stone band across the second floor, white loading doors and an iron hoist on the right, under a blue sky with white clouds. — The lettering across the front, on Southwark Street.

Also in Museums.

David Kirkaldy was a Dundee-born engineer who spent eighteen years as chief draughtsman at a Glasgow shipyard, at a time when nobody could say with any confidence how strong a piece of iron or steel actually was. Builders bought material on the word of the man selling it. Kirkaldy set out to replace that with measurement: he ran his own experiments, published them in 1862, and left to build a machine that could pull anything apart and record exactly what it took.

A Leeds firm delivered it in 1865. It is 47 feet long, weighs 116 tons, and can pull with a force of a million pounds — some 450 tons — using water pressure to do the pulling and a weight sliding along a beam to weigh it. In 1874 he opened a works at 99 Southwark Street built around the machine, and cut FACTS NOT OPINIONS over the door, which was his whole argument in three words: he would test for anyone, take nobody's side, and publish what the metal did.

The firm worked for a hundred years. It examined the wreckage of the Tay Bridge, which fell into the river in 1879 with a train crossing it; the ironwork of Hammersmith Bridge; the Skylon that hung over the Festival of Britain; and the metal of the Comet airliners that broke up in mid-air in 1954. It closed in 1974, and the machine, still bolted where it was set down and still able to work, is now the museum.

Where: 99 Southwark Street, SE1 0JF
Nearest station: Southwark · 4 min walk

Google Maps @factsnotopinions testingworks.org.uk

Regular events

Premium tour, with a live testAdvertised dates, booked ahead · See the booking pageKirkaldy's 116-ton Universal Testing Machine pulls a metal bar apart in front of you, as it has since 1874. A shorter, cheaper tour without that demonstration runs once a month.

Tours on the first Sunday at 13:30, the third Saturday at 14:00 and the fourth Saturday at 13:30

£23 for the long tour, £15 for the standard; walk-ins taken. The machine is run on the tours.

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.