The Horniman’s 2025 temporary exhibition – it runs until November – is the return of an old fave. Last seen in 2017, Evergreen Exhibitions’s Robot Zoo is a globe-trotting touring affair that revolves around an eye-popping collection of literally larger-than-life, animatronic beasts. Which look pretty cool: a giraffe and a rhino are roughly life size. But the real freaky charm lies in the small creatures blown up into gigantic robot versions of themselves – a cricket, a fly, a chameleon, a platypus; all look like they’d need a tank to take them down if they came for you IRL.
Pepped up with at least one interactive component per creature and some corresponding activities that have the air of end-of-the-pier novelty to them – a mechanical squid race, a bit where you ‘shoot’ insects with a chameleon’s tongue – it’s all good fun, and I’m pleased to report that the relatively lo-fi machines seem to be able to take out the pounding a legion of pre-schoolers gleefully bestowed upon them.
Still, at the risk of being boring, it all feels a bit basic. Yes, we nominally learn about the animals. But it’s simplistic stuff, and there’s definitely more of a sense of it being an animal-themed playroom than anything else. Certainly we learn next to nothing about how the robots were constructed or what they were made from, or indeed who made them.
Arguably this is somewhat par for the course for a Horniman exhibition – they are always aimed at younger audiences, and virtually all involve large scale models or animatronics. But some can be genuinely illuminating – like its excellent Permian exhibition – while this is essentially some very cool-looking robots combined with an excuse for little ones to smash buttons for half an hour or so. Great fun for the tots, maybe less so for slightly older children.
