Housed in a small unit, tucked away on a quiet by-street in Holborn, London, just off of Red Lion Square, is the strange yet excellent Novelty Automation
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford,” once mused Samuel Johnson. Presumably he had just come back from an afternoon at Novelty Automation when he said that.
Housed in a small unit, tucked away on a quiet by-street in Holborn, London, just off of Red Lion Square, is the perfect afternoon out, especially for those who have begun feeling that they’ve tasted all that the English capital has to offer.
You’ve been to M&M World. You’ve seen the big blue whale at the Natural History Museum more times than you care to admit. You’ve looked at Big Ben from Westminster Bridge. The obvious next step is Novelty Automation.
The shop is a vibrant treasure-trove of Victorian-style automatons operated by shiny silver coins that roll down the cashier’s chute into your awaiting bucket.
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Over the course of one to two hours, you’ll make your way around the small shop, slotting between one and three coins into each of about 20 machines. The cost is reasonable: a bucket of 35 coins coming in at £28 and seeming plenty enough for three.
Some machines do all of the work for you, such as the AirbedbugBNB, which invites up to two players to draw a curtain around them and witness the story of a family of bedbugs as they look for a suitable holiday let to settle down in. Another, the Instant Eclipse, had my friend clamber into a small, dark rocket-shaped pod. He emerged a minute later and refused to explain what had happened. He seemed similarly perturbed after placing his socked foot inside the robot chipodist machine.
Those units that do require some participation are still much more focused on being vehicles of satire than on putting a gamer’s hand-eye coordination to the test.
One of the most addictive had the three of us tensely willing on a magnetised haul of coins up past financial regulators to the top of a skyscraper, where our ill-gotten gains could be effortlessly lost amid the City of London’s modern spires.
A particularly silly yet on-the-nose bit of satire comes in the form of the Fulfillment Centre machine, which has players powering an Amazon warehouse worker on an impossible and gruelling trial shift by running manically on the spot.
Novelty Automation is the work of Tim Hunkin, a Suffolk-based inventor and cartoonist who presented a TV show called The Secret Life of Machines and drew a comic strip for The Observer called The Rudiments of Wisdom.
Clearly, that combination of experiences has been brought together and used to excellent effect. The stylisation of the machines, their absurdist humour and gross characters remind me of the work of Chris Simpsons Artist.
Arguably, the pinnacle of it all comes in the form of Is it Art?, which invited us to put an object into a small glass box. We chose a lighter which then rose up into the eyeliner of a mannequin art critic. After a short moment of consideration and a closer look he concluded that yes, it was indeed art.