Novelty Automation is a single room off Theobald's Road in Holborn holding about twenty homemade arcade machines, and it is free to walk into. You only pay for tokens to play: £6 for five, £10 for ten, or £28 for the thirty-five tokens it takes to try every machine.
The machines were built by Tim Hunkin, an engineer and cartoonist who has been making coin-operated machines since the 1980s. None of them is a video game. Each is a wooden cabinet with motors, levers and a set of instructions, and each one is a joke about something: money laundering, nuclear power, airport security, the art market, package holidays, working in a warehouse.
It takes fifteen minutes if you buy five tokens and pick the ones with the shortest queues, and well over an hour if you are determined to play everything. Most visitors plan for the first and stay for the second.
Novelty Automation, Princeton Street
- Address
- 1a Princeton Street, London WC1R 4AX
- Entry
- Free
- Tokens
- £6 for 5, £10 for 10, £28 for 35 (35 tokens are needed to try every machine)
- Open
- Every day except Monday, 11am to 6pm; Thursday 12pm to 8pm; Sunday 12pm to 6pm
- Nearest stations
- Holborn or Chancery Lane, about five minutes' walk each
- Time needed
- 15 minutes to over an hour
- Booking
- Not required
How the tokens work, and which bundle to buy
There is no admission charge and no ticket. You go in, you look at the machines, and if you want to play one you put a token in. Tokens come from a machine by the door and the price drops as you buy more: five for £6 works out at £1.20 a go, ten for £10 at £1 a go, and thirty-five for £28 at 80p a go.
The important number is thirty-five, because that is what the arcade itself says you need to play everything. There are around twenty machines, so several of them take more than one token. If you have travelled across London for this, buy the £28 bundle and share it: two adults and two children can work through the whole room on one set, which makes a family visit cost less than a single adult ticket at most paid attractions in central London.
If you are only passing, five tokens is enough to understand what the place is. Spend them on the machines with a physical gag rather than a screen, and skip the ones with a queue.
Thirty-five tokens for £28 is the only sensible family purchase here. Five tokens will be gone in eight minutes and someone will be cross. Buy the big bundle, hand them out, and let each person choose their own machines rather than queueing together for the same one.
The machines, and what they actually do to you
Hunkin's own machines make up most of the room. The Chiropodist, which was the first one he built for Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in Covent Garden, asks you to take off a shoe and put your bare foot into a dark bay, where a mechanical practitioner descends and works on it. Test Your Nerve wants your hand inside a dog's cage, and the dog pants and dribbles warm saliva on it. Autofrisk fits you with a pair of rubber gloves and searches you.
Others are gentler. Microbreak sits you in a chair and takes you on holiday by magic carpet. Instant Eclipse shuts you into a box and darkens the sky until the stars come out. The Small Hadron Collider sends you after a grand unified theory and a Nobel prize. Is It Art? lets you present any object you are carrying to an expert who delivers a verdict on it.
Then there is the satire: Money Laundering, where you pick cash out of the gutter and get it into the City without the regulators noticing; My-Nuke, which hands you a manipulator arm and some fuel pellets; Instant Weightloss; Divorce, a race to separate; The Fulfilment Center, which asks whether you have what it takes to work in an Amazon warehouse; and i-Zombie, about people looking at their phones.
A handful of machines are by other makers: Cycle Pong by Iain Sharp, played by pedalling, The Dream by Paul Spooner, Barry's Love Line by Will Jackson, which dispenses romantic advice in the voice of Barry White, and Air Bed-n-Bug, which is part automata and part flea circus.
Is it suitable for children?
The arcade publishes no minimum age and children are welcome, but read the machine list before you promise a treat. Pet or Meat spins an arrow and then shows you in detail what happens to the lamb. Autofrisk and Test Your Nerve are designed to be uncomfortable. Divorce and Money Laundering are jokes aimed squarely at adults.
Our experience of what works in a room like this is simple: children of about eight and upwards tend to love the physical machines and ignore the political ones, while younger children can find Test Your Nerve genuinely upsetting. If your group is mostly small, our indoor list for wet days with children has softer options, and the wider family guide to London sets out what the big paid attractions cost by comparison. Teenagers, on the other hand, are the ideal audience, and there is more in that vein in our guide to London with teenagers.
Getting in: the door is 650mm wide
This matters more than anything else on the practical side. Novelty Automation occupies a 17th-century building and the front door is 650 millimetres wide. The arcade says so plainly and asks wheelchair users to measure first, because chairs range from about 600 to 700 millimetres. If yours is at the wider end you will not get through. Our guide to accessible London covers the venues that are easier.
The room is also small, and on a wet Saturday it can hold as many people as it comfortably can. There is no timed entry and no queue system: if it is full you wait on the pavement for a few minutes.
When to go, and the Thursday evening
Mondays are closed. The best hour is around 11am on a weekday, when you can play a machine twice without anybody behind you. Weekend afternoons are the opposite, and the machines with the longest performances build the longest queues.
Thursday is the odd day: the arcade opens later, at 12pm, and stays open until 8pm. It also runs an occasional "First Thursday" bar evening, with the next listed for 1 October 2026 from 5pm to 9pm. An arcade full of adults with drinks in their hands is a different experience from the same room on a Saturday afternoon, and if you are in London anyway it is the version to catch.
Thursday opening starts at noon, not 11am. It is the one day of the week when arriving early does not work. Turn up at 11am on a Thursday and you will find the door shut, so use the extra hour on the Soane museum round the corner and come back at midday.
Where it sits, and what to pair it with
Princeton Street runs off Bedford Row, between Theobald's Road and Red Lion Street. From Holborn station it is about five minutes on foot, and from Chancery Lane about the same. The British Museum is roughly ten minutes away, which makes this an unusually good antidote to two hours of Assyrian reliefs.
Hunkin chose the area deliberately, because the 18th-century city survives here better than it does in Covent Garden. Two free museums are within a short walk and both belong in the same afternoon: Sir John Soane's Museum on Lincoln's Inn Fields, which needs no booking, and the Hunterian Museum of surgical specimens at the Royal College of Surgeons. Our guide to Holborn has the lunch options and the quieter squares, and our round-up of London's best small museums puts Novelty Automation's neighbours in context.
Is it worth the money?
Yes, and it is one of the few places in central London where we would say that without a caveat about the price. Free entry means you can look before you commit, and £28 for a family to play twenty machines is unusual value in Zone 1. The comparison that makes the point: a single adult ticket to one of the big branded attractions costs more than the whole room here.
What you are paying for is not polish. The cabinets are homemade, the timing is mechanical, and one or two machines are usually out of action being repaired. That is the nature of a place where everything was built by hand, and it is also why nothing here feels like anything else in the city. If you want a comparison, our list of free things to do in London covers what nothing at all buys you, and the games bars with putting greens and dartboards show what the commercial version of an evening of silly competition costs instead. For something free and loud in the same spirit, the screens at Outernet are a fifteen-minute walk west.
Two more ideas for an hour indoors near here: our guides to escape rooms and to what to do in London when it rains.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Novelty Automation cost?
Entry is free. You pay only for tokens to play the machines: £6 buys five tokens, £10 buys ten and £28 buys thirty-five, which the arcade says is the number needed to try every machine. Prices checked September 2026.
What days is Novelty Automation open?
Every day except Monday. The normal hours are 11am to 6pm, with a later start and a later finish on Thursday, 12pm to 8pm, and 12pm to 6pm on Sunday. No booking is needed at any time.
How long do you need at Novelty Automation?
Fifteen minutes will show you the room and let you play four or five machines. Working through all twenty, with the waiting that involves at busy times, takes between an hour and ninety minutes. It sits comfortably beside a morning at the British Museum.
Is Novelty Automation wheelchair accessible?
Only partly. The building dates from the 17th century and the front door is 650 millimetres wide. Wheelchairs are typically 600 to 700 millimetres across, so the arcade asks visitors to measure their chair and check before travelling.
Who made the machines at Novelty Automation?
Most were built by Tim Hunkin, who has been making coin-operated machines since the 1980s and also runs the Under The Pier Show on Southwold pier in Suffolk. A few are by other makers, including Iain Sharp, Paul Spooner and Will Jackson.
Sources
- Novelty Automation - opening hours and location (checked September 2026)
- Novelty Automation - prices, directions and disabled access (checked September 2026)
- Novelty Automation - machines currently on display (checked September 2026)
- Novelty Automation - an introduction by Tim Hunkin (checked September 2026)