The Kirkaldy Testing Museum opens for three advertised tours a month, not one: two long ones at 1.30pm on the first Sunday and the fourth Saturday, at £23 a head, and a shorter one at 2pm on the third Saturday, at £15. Only the £23 tours run the machine. Everything is booked in advance, and the volunteers who run it now call the place Kirkaldy's Testing Works.
What you are buying a ticket to is a single room on Southwark Street containing a horizontal hydraulic machine nearly forty-eight feet long, built in the 1860s to pull metal apart until it broke. It still works. On the longer tour somebody loads a test piece, opens the valve and destroys it in front of you, which is not an experience any other museum in the city offers. Our survey of London's smallest museums lists it among the one-room collections that open only a few days a year.
This page goes further than that list does: which of the two tours to book, what actually happens during them, and whether the subject will hold you for two and a half hours.
Kirkaldy's Testing Works: the dates and prices
- Premium tour
- First Sunday and fourth Saturday of the month, 1.30pm, about two and a half hours, maximum 24 people. £23 plus a booking fee. Includes a live run of the Universal Testing Machine.
- Standard tour
- Third Saturday of the month, 2pm, about an hour and a half, maximum 15 people. £15 plus a booking fee. No machine run.
- Exceptions
- No fourth-Saturday tour in December. In September the third-Saturday tour is replaced by the building's Open House weekend opening.
- Booking
- In advance through the museum's listed links; bookings close twelve hours before the start. Standard tours usually keep a few door places.
- Address
- 99 Southwark Street, London SE1 0JF
- Nearest stations
- Southwark, London Bridge, Borough and Waterloo, all inside ten minutes on foot
- Listing
- The building and the machine were both raised to Grade II* in June 2014, and the site is on the Heritage at Risk register
Which of the two tours to book
Take the £23 one. The difference is not length, it is whether the Universal Testing Machine runs, and a static Victorian machine is a very different proposition from a working one. The shorter tour is a reasonable fallback if the dates do not fit, and it is the only one with a realistic chance of a place on the door.
The two long tours a month are capped at twenty-four people and the short one at fifteen, which is unusually small even for a volunteer museum. That cap is also why the popular dates disappear: at forty-eight places a month on the long tours and fifteen on the short one, the whole year offers around 750 tickets. If your London trip is fixed, look at the calendar before you book anything else, because the museum cannot flex around you.
Two and a half hours in one room sounds long. In practice the premium tour includes a film about the works, explanation of the smaller machines, and the set-up and run of the big one, and the pace is set by the equipment rather than by a script.
Turning up on the day costs less, not more. The museum says places are usually available on standard tours, and that door tickets are the same price without the booking fee. Arrive five minutes before the stated time at the front door. Card is accepted but the volunteers prefer cash.
What happens when they run the machine
The Universal Testing Machine is forty-seven feet seven inches long, and the charity describes it as a 116-ton machine. It works horizontally rather than vertically, which is why it needs a room to itself: a water-hydraulic cylinder and ram pull a specimen apart along the length of the frame, and the machine can apply up to 440 tons, a million pounds of force.
The power used to come from a steam engine. From 1905 it came instead from the mains of the London Hydraulic Power Company, boosted by an intensifier that is still in the basement. Today a small electric pump does the work. The sequence you watch is the one Kirkaldy's staff followed: clamp the piece, raise the pressure, watch the needle, and wait for the failure.
Bring something warm. This is an unheated Victorian workshop with a stone floor, and in January it feels like it. Photography is straightforward and there is nothing behind glass, which is part of the charm.
David Kirkaldy, and the words over the door
Carved above the entrance are three words: Facts Not Opinions. They are the whole argument of the building.
David Kirkaldy was born near Dundee in 1820 and spent his early career as a draughtsman at Robert Napier's shipyard in Glasgow, at the moment when shipbuilding was moving from sail to steam and from iron to steel. Nobody could say reliably how strong the new materials were. He published his own systematic tests on wrought iron and steel in 1862, patented his machine in 1863 and had it built by Greenwood and Batley of Leeds, so impatient with progress that he had the unfinished machine shipped to London to be completed. His first Testing Works opened on 1 January 1866 at The Grove, a few streets from here. Demand outgrew it quickly, and in 1874 the business moved into this purpose-built building by Thomas Roger Smith, which the charity describes as the world's first purpose-built independent commercial materials testing house. It stayed for three generations and almost a century.
The samples came from everywhere. Material from the new Blackfriars Bridge arrived almost as soon as he opened for business. Steel for James Eads's bridge over the Mississippi, opened in 1874 and the first large structure to use steel structurally. Suspension links for Hammersmith Bridge in the 1880s, two samples taken from every batch of fifty. Cables for the Skylon at the Festival of Britain in 1951, tested by Kirkaldy's grandson.
In 1880 he examined wreckage recovered from the Tay Bridge, which had collapsed with a train on it the previous December. He was not on the official Court of Inquiry and disagreed with how his results were read; his own annotated copy of the report is kept in the building. His obituary in The Engineer called him "honest as the sun; outspoken and fearless as a Viking", and also "the best hated man in London". He is buried at Highgate Cemetery.
The smaller machines, and the floors you will not see
The room is not only the big machine. Working examples of the standard tools of the trade stand around it: Charpy and Izod pendulum impact testers that swing a weight into a notched sample, Brinell and Vickers hardness testers, and a Riehlé tension and compression machine of about 1890 from Philadelphia, with a thirty-ton capacity, which Imperial College used from new until 1985 before donating it. A Denison chain tester, put into the basement in 1906 to pull marine chains apart with a hydraulic ram, is one of the few things here that no longer works.
The oddest exhibit is the cement briquette machine, which clamps a dog-bone-shaped sample and loads it by running lead shot into a bucket; when the sample breaks, the falling can cuts off the supply and you weigh the bucket. Also on show, in the chain testing room, is a certificate Kirkaldy issued in 1877 for brick tests on a Midland Railway branch line.
What you cannot see is the rest of the works. Kirkaldy kept a "museum of fractures" on the second and third floors to show clients what failure looked like; those floors are private offices now. Detailed photographs of them taken in 1885 are sold as postcards at the front desk, which is a decent souvenir and better than most museum shops manage.
Who this is for
Book it if
- You like machines, bridges or Victorian industry
- You have already done the obvious museums
- You want something in London that fewer than three hundred visitors a year can attend
- You are travelling with a teenager who has taken physics seriously
- Two and a half hours of one subject appeals rather than alarms
Skip it if
- You have small children with you
- You want to drop in for twenty minutes
- Stairs, cold floors or standing for two hours are a problem
- Your dates do not match one of the three tour days
- You would rather see objects than mechanisms
On the teenage question the museum is unusually specific. It runs materials-testing workshops for Year 12 and above, built with physics teachers from Dulwich College, City of London School and Whitgift School, in which students take their own measurements. That is a fair guide to the age at which the public tours land: about sixteen upwards, and younger only if the interest is genuine. The Science Museum covers the same ground for younger children, with buttons.
The Testing Works publishes no access statement. Nothing on either of its two websites describes step-free entry, seating or toilets, and this is a working nineteenth-century workshop with a basement and upper floors. If access matters, contact the museum through its website before you book rather than after.
Getting there, and what else is on that block
Ninety-nine Southwark Street sits between Blackfriars Road and Borough Market, a few minutes from the river. Southwark, London Bridge, Borough and Waterloo are all within ten minutes on foot, which makes it one of the easiest small museums in London to reach and one of the hardest to get into. Our guide to Southwark and Bankside covers the streets around it.
The tour ends in mid-afternoon on a Saturday or Sunday, which leaves the rest of the day. Tate Modern is a short walk north and free. The Old Operating Theatre, near London Bridge, is the other small Southwark museum that works on a single vivid idea, and it opens far more often. Southwark Cathedral and the market are between the two. For dinner afterwards, see where to eat near London Bridge.
If the appeal here is engineering you can stand inside, two other places do the same thing on a different scale: the Brunel shaft at Rotherhithe, where the first tunnel under a navigable river began, and the Crossness pumping station out east, which also opens on a handful of days. For the bridges whose iron passed through this room, see our walking guide to the Thames crossings. Two more buildings that open rarely and reward the planning are Two Temple Place and the London Mithraeum. All of them appear in our list of small museums worth the detour. In September, the works takes part in the Open House Festival, which is the one weekend you may get in without paying.
Frequently asked questions
How often is the Kirkaldy Testing Museum open?
Three advertised dates a month: a long tour with a machine run at 1.30pm on the first Sunday and again on the fourth Saturday, and a shorter tour at 2pm on the third Saturday. There is no fourth-Saturday tour in December, and in September the third-Saturday slot is given over to the building's Open House opening.
How much does a tour of Kirkaldy's Testing Works cost?
The long tour is £23 and the short one £15, in both cases plus a booking fee when you reserve online. Buying at the door, where places exist, costs the same without the fee. Card payment is accepted, though the volunteers prefer cash.
Do you get to see the big machine working?
Only on the £23 tours. Those run on the first Sunday and the fourth Saturday of each month and include a live test on the Universal Testing Machine, which applies up to 440 tons of force to a specimen until it fails. The £15 tour explains the machine but does not run it.
Is the Kirkaldy Testing Museum suitable for children?
It is aimed at adults and older teenagers. The museum's own education work starts at Year 12, the tours run for between ninety minutes and two and a half hours with a good deal of standing, and there is no play element. Bring a fourteen-year-old who likes engineering, not a family.
Where is the Kirkaldy Testing Museum?
At 99 Southwark Street, SE1 0JF, in the purpose-built works David Kirkaldy opened in 1874. Southwark, London Bridge, Borough and Waterloo stations are each within about ten minutes' walk, and Tate Modern is a short walk north towards the river.
Sources
- Kirkaldy's Testing Works – Visit us (checked September 2026)
- Kirkaldy's Testing Works – About: the machine, the makers and the history (checked September 2026)
- Kirkaldy Testing Museum – Tour dates, times and prices (checked September 2026)