Postcard from London: the built-for-Insta Paradox Museum

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“People take pictures of the summer / Just in case someone thought they had missed it / And to prove that it really existed.” That was The Kinks, one of the great London bands, in a song from 1968, “People Take Pictures of Each Other”. It ought to be playing on loop as you enter the capital’s latest “immersive” experience, the Paradox Museum.

This puzzlingly named attraction, which opened last week, is sited opposite the tourist honeypot of Harrods department store in Knightsbridge. It advertises itself as “the most paradoxical experience in the world”, a place “where nothing makes sense yet everything feels real”. I can actually think of bigger paradoxes — like the conundrum of eye-watering prices and tears-inducing inefficiency on Britain’s railways — but let’s put that to one side. The Paradox Museum does indeed have a mind-boggling aspect. 

Its honeycomb of rooms contains more than 50 exhibits illustrating quirks of perception. There is a mirrored maze in which you inch along trying not to bump into yourself. A rotating octahedron drum mocked up to look like a space station mimics the effect of zero gravity. A walkway runs through another rotating space, this time with a London Underground theme. It underlines a challenge evident to anyone who has spent too long in a London pub — the difficulty of walking in a straight line when everything is swirling around you.

‘This is like Schrödinger’s cat, alive and dead at the same time,’ I overhear a knowledgeable dad telling his son by ‘The Paradox Box’

QR codes for smartphones are attached to walls for further elucidation. The inquisitive visitor can learn that a model on a plinth resembling a triangle that has been wrenched apart “violates the laws of geometry”. As I read these words, a young girl ducks under one end of the Euclid-defying shape as though in a playground.

There are lots of children and their parents present when I visit. “This is like Schrödinger’s cat, alive and dead at the same time,” I overhear a knowledgeable dad telling his son by “The Paradox Box”, a vitrine containing a three-dimensional model of a cartoon-style cat. From one angle, it is a skeleton; from another, it is full-bodied. But the father is dadsplaining to a half-empty space. Like Schrödinger’s kid, there but not there, his son is on the move to the next attraction.

Alongside the QR codes are signs about how to take “the perfect photo”. They reveal the real purpose of the Paradox Museum — to generate Instagrammable images. To paraphrase The Kinks, it exists in order for people to take pictures to show that they have been there. 

A dad asks me to take a photo of him and his teenage son in a room with a tilted floor, creating a trick of perspective whereby one looks tiny and the other looks huge. The son makes a monster gesture as he hulks over the tiny dad cowering in the other corner. Elsewhere, a mother’s legs poke out of a sofa as her small child sits next to her, his legs invisible. “Up, down — stop!” a father barks at his daughter as he gets her to pose at the other end of a large Toblerone-shaped mirrored kaleidoscope. 

As a solitary visitor, and apparently the only adult without an accompanying child, I self-consciously take selfies as I go through the rooms. An outdoor balcony allows for a straight-faced self-portrait with Harrods in the background. The zero-gravity space chamber is the busiest attraction. An attendant fixes my phone in the wall facing the rotating chamber in order to video me in it, like a limp piece of laundry in the drum of a very slow-moving washing machine. The illusion of weightlessness takes place in the video on my phone, not the experience itself.

The 9th outpost of a global chain founded in Athens in 2022, the Paradox Museum is a museum in the same way that the Tower of London’s Beefeaters are people who eat beef. Well, yes, but mainly no. It makes for a diverting hour or so, although it competes with the paradox of plenty. As I head home through nearby Kensington Gardens, I pass a group of people clustered around a tree snapping pictures of a gravity-defying squirrel on its trunk. Behind them is a huge pumpkin sculpture where more photos are being taken. In its blink-and-you-miss-it summer, London is a treasure trove of Instagrammable photo opportunities. 

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