Twist Museum – 05/04/23

I realise I still haven’t told you what I did on Sunday night – and I will tell you because it’s not often that I do anything remotely hip – but I have something else to tell you about. The Easter holidays are in full flow and I was off work today so wanted to take the kids on an adventure.

All adventures need fuel and we started out at the Mood Lift Cafe near Highams Park station. We had Yorkshire Aunty staying so had to stoke her with red meat before dispatching her back to Leeds. Reuben and I also ordered breakfast baps and Eva had her customary Eva-brunch of scrambled egg, toast, halloumi and hash browns. All the yellow things. Plus some bubble tea, which we’d be carrying around for the next few hours.

Then we took Yorkshire Aunty to Kings Cross and hung out a bit by the canal because the Harry Potter shop had a queue outside and we didn’t fancy that, especially as I wasn’t planning on spending any money in the Harry Potter shop. Still, it was a pleasant day for sitting outside on the fake grass even if Reuben spent most of the time trying to use the fake grass to generate static electricity and shock us. And he was successful. Ouch.

We also spotted this family waiting area which looks a fun place to hang out if we ever need to actually catch a train from Kings Cross. There’s a slide, comfy seats, a model railway and little waiting huts:

After we dropped the spare at Platform 6 and no quarters, we hopped back on the tube and got to Oxford Circus with an hour and a half to kill before our timed entry to the Twist museum. So we wandered around Kingdom of Sweets, again with no intention of spending any money.

And the Disney Store, with a similar lack of intentions. But it was a great place to entertain the kids for a while, especially with the Marvel/Star Wars/Lego “fan zone” upstairs, which was more to Reuben’s taste than the Disney Princess sections:

Then we went to Pret on Vere Street and actually did spend some money on snacks and drinks although of course I got my prepaid coffee. And Eva was still clutching the bubble tea from brunch, so it was an economical trip. It’s a decent sized Pret as well, with lots of seating downstairs and a customer toilet, albeit one where you have to track a staff member down and get the code before you’re allowed in.

By the time we’d finished caffeinating and energising ourselves, it was almost 2pm and our tickets for the Twist museum were for 2:15 entry, with the advice being to arrive 15 minutes early. I think we timed it pretty perfectly. Just to manage expectations after a friend misheard our destination – this is the *Twist* museum, not the Crisp museum. There were no ancient packets of Walkers on display.

The Twist museum is a few doors down from where I used to work, which probably won’t help you find it, but it’s also a couple of minutes’ walk from Oxford Circus, on the same side of the road as H&M. You can spot it pretty easily from the outside:

It looks tiny but the museum is all downstairs. Before you go in, there are lockers and a place to hang coats – the FAQ suggests that all food and drink is left in the lockers but this wasn’t particularly enforced. Probably a good idea to leave as much as possible in the lockers tho, as there are things you’ll need to climb into and you do not want to be dragging a picnic around when you do that. The lockers also seemed to have an issue with the unlocking codes but the staff were very helpful and unlocked it for me when it was time to leave….so don’t worry if you put a code in and it doesn’t unlock. Just be prepared to describe what’s inside the locker and be able to prove that it’s yours.

Anyway, enough of the admin – onto the exhibits! The gateway to the museum is this jaunty corridor:

And the first room makes everyone look like they should be in the Simpsons:

I won’t go through every exhibit as I don’t want to give too many spoilers for anyone else who wants to visit but here were some of the highlights.

The human-size kaleidoscope:

The infinity boxes:

The illusion rooms:

And the seat illusion, where you could have one giant child and one tiny one (I mean, I have those already but you could choose which is which):

These were the big ticket items but there were so many other things to look at as we went through – classic “which square is darker?” and “which line is longer?” illusions, along with a sound lab with some auditory illusions and even a sensory exhibit with hot and cold pads to touch (although the warning about “feeling painful” might put you off this one)

It was fairly crowded and a lot of the exhibits involve being a certain distance away to make them work. So there was quite a lot of people walking backwards into people to try and get a good photo or to see a magic-eye type picture come to life. But everyone was terribly polite about it and seemed to be very understanding. The illusion rooms had short queues to get into but again, everyone was very ordered and polite about it. Thinking about it now, I don’t remember seeing any staff members within the exhibition rooms so visitors did have to self-organise to an extent but it all worked fine. It took us an hour to go through, almost exactly, and it is fairly expensive for the amount of time you spend there but everything in London is getting more expensive all the time so that’s to be expected.

There isn’t a cafe but there is a vending machine and a small gift shop. Eva had asked this decision maker whether we should go and find food after we left and it said “yes”:

So where else but Five Guys Argyll Street for a pile of fries the size of our heads?

And then back home before the tubes got too rush-houry. This annual leave mlarkey is exhausting isn’t it? Lucky I’m back at work tomorrow!

For tickets and more information, click here.