Beasts of London, Museum of London, review: a crazily enjoyable immersive experience

A snarling lion; a sinuous fox; a squawking pigeon; a skittering rat. These are just some of the beasts who come vividly to life in this crazily enjoyable new exhibition, which feels akin to falling down a rabbit hole into the past.

Conceived and executed by the Museum of London in partnership with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Beasts of London is a journey through London’s history, told through its animals. It is subdivided into nine “episodes”, starting with Prehistory, where a darkened room is gradually filled with light and music, while constellations – of a lion, a bear, a mammoth – are picked out on the walls. You then travel through time – the Plague years, the Victorian era – until you reach the present, where you are greeted with the sights of dogs, cats and foxes who talk about their experiences (the cat, for example, adamant that it is no pet).

Each episode – a five-minute, immersive experience – is played out in a different room where the animals’ stories are told by well-known voices with an artefact from the museum acting as a talisman from the past that triggers the dive back in time.

And so we have a fragment of a Samian bowl, almost 2,000 years old, to examine, before entering a circular room where you sit on a column above a mosaic-painted floor to listen to Pam Ferris as the voice of the eagle in Roman London, chatting to Joe Pasquale’s dormouse. In plague-ridden London, an original apothecary’s jar is the jumping off point to move into a shop with dead rats encased in blocks of acrylic, where Brian Blessed booms out around you as the voice of the bacterium and Miles Jupp plays a flea.

It all feels wonderfully creative and some of the visuals are really special: pigeons are celebrated here for their iconic London status, represented by a giant sculpture of a pigeon created out of old taxicabs.

My son’s favourite room was the Age of the Horse. He sat on a carousel horse while equine stars from London’s past appeared on the walls around him, telling their stories. These included Governatore, the steed to King Henry VIII (voiced by Stephen Mangan) and the noble Cavalry Black (Nish Kumar). I was particularly fond of the last room, They’re Still Here, where Kate Moss brilliantly voices the sly fox in what is probably the longest speech we’ll ever hear her give. She extols the virtues of prowling the dark streets, slave to no one.

Beasts of London takes just over an hour and each visit is restricted to a group of 12, which means there’s plenty of space to see, and hear, which will be a welcome relief for parents during the Easter holidays (although you’ll have to organise yourself and book in advance). However, if you’ve got smaller children, beware. It’s billed as being suitable for seven-year-olds and older, which seems reasonable.

This is relatively sophisticated fare, and my not-quite-three-year-old was a bit scared at times, most notably in the eerie-feeling Plague room.

However, the imagination and innovation with which this exhibition has been put together is second to none. And you’ll never look at Kate Moss in the same way again.

Until Jan 5 2020. Tickets: 020 7001 9844; museumoflondon.org.uk