3 min read

REVIEW: PARADOX MUSEUM LONDON

Expand your children's minds - then blow them with a visit to London's most brain-bending experience

Nothing is what it seems at Paradox Museum, which successfully blows children's minds, while sneakily expanding them, leaving you with a camera reel of amazing snaps to remember it by.

The colourful world of more than 50 interactive exhibits is cat-nip for kids, combining flashing lights, candy-coloured walls, rotating rooms, upside-down tube stations, and mirror mazes, to challenge perspective and reality.

It's easy to see why the museum has blown up on social media, since launching in May. Every room offers a killer selfie opportunity - even more so with the venue's recent Halloween makeover, which we couldn't resist visiting.

There are staff on hand to take control of the camera for those who are visiting alone (or with an excited six year-old, as we are), and you’ll grab enough content to keep your Insta feed on form for weeks.

Every picture opportunity also hides a lesson on perspective, camouflage, scientific discoveries and brain-bending illusions, which you can access via QR codes in each space.

As we enter the museum, we’re immediately funnelled into a short queue for Zero Gravity, an add-on experience costing just £2, which ends up being the biggest hit with our daughter. We fix our phone to a holder on the wall, press record, and step into a rotating, padded space pod where we clamber over the walls and ceiling like a pair of crazed astronauts.

The premise is simple - as the phone rotates with us, the video ends up looking as though the room is static and we’re free from the shackles of gravity. If you’ve ever seen the making of Inception, you’ll know that this is the closest we’ll ever get to being in a Christopher Nolan movie.

With our content saved, we move swiftly into the camouflage room, where we pull on red and black patterned robes, which allow us to blend seamlessly into the patterns on the floor, walls and ceiling. As new visitors arrive into the room, they're greeted by walls that shriek with laughter until our daughter's face pops out from beneath her hood

Infinity mirrors get a good showing, as does a clever dancing room, where yellow, red and blue spotlights create a multicoloured shadow effect that teaches us how coloured lights can create coloured shadows - and make a six year-old feel like a pop star at the same time.

A spooky sofa is the next big-hitter, as we’re invited to contort ourselves into strategically-placed hideaways that leave the impression we’ve been sliced in half, while watching TV.

It’s the first of multiple attractions that have been given a Halloween makeover, with cobwebs and spiders providing the backdrop - although the sight of a beheaded schoolgirl sitting next to her dad's legs is probably on-brand enough for October..

An optical illusion is next on the Halloween trail, as our daughter is invited to don a wizard’s hat and summon the head of her dad from a seemingly empty table using nothing but magic, witchcraft and some carefully-placed mirrors. Her cackles of delight are a sign that the magic has well and truly worked on her.

The ingenious kaleidoscope is a little too high for our daughter to take that a picture, but we did get a gaggle of images of my confused face repeated for eternity in a pattern that could be used to scare away badgers.

We move swiftly onto a mirror maze (in which we get spectacularly lost, and eventually abandon our mission by leaving through the entrance) and a walk-in kaleidoscope, where our daughter spends twenty minutes throwing herself around, swamped in the swirling colours of a Halloween castle, pumpkins and bat-laden sky.

There’s one last chance for a killer Insta shot before we go, in the form of an upside-down Underground Station, where we hang from the departure board like a pair of demented monkeys.

Then, we’re thrust back into the well-heeled streets of Belgravia again, wondering if it was all just a fever dream. Thankfully, we’ve got the pictures to prove it - plenty of pictures, in fact - and our daughter hasn’t stopped scrolling through them since.

Paradox Museum London, 90 Brompton Rd, London, UK. SW3 1JJ, Buy Tickets

Tickets from £17.50 (children) and £23 (adults). Under 3’s go free. Zero Gravity add-on £2