Family life / One night at the Natural History Museum, London, autumn 2021
Was It Super Expensive? Yes. Did We Sleep? No.
A mother’s two-line review of a night under the whale at the Natural History Museum should have put me off. I booked it the same evening.
Susan, who blogs about educating her girls at home, took the family to sleep on the floor of the Natural History Museum’s Hintze Hall, under the whale skeleton, and wrote the most honest review I have ever read. Question one: “Was it super expensive? YES” Question two: “Did we actually sleep? NO” I read it twice, nodded, and booked. Here is our night, by the clock.
6.30pm. Arrival time, going by Susan’s evening. We arrived at 6.04, because I had planned the Tube around delays and there were none. We spent twenty-six minutes on the pavement with four roll mats, a cool bag and my husband, who had brought a camping stove “in case”.
8pm. Activities. Susan says they ran from arrival until lights out at midnight, and I attended every one of them, near the front, answering questions addressed to children. Our daughter, who is nine, asked to be moved to a different group. She did not specify which one I should join.
10pm. Across the road at the Science Museum, on its own sleepover, a Time Out reviewer once sat through “a 10pm lecture on the digestive tracts of astronauts”. I learned this on the train home and have not recovered. Somebody else’s children got space toilets. Mine got beetles.
Midnight. Lights out. Here the reviews part company. Susan found the floor “surprisingly warm and comfortable” and sleep came easily for the girls, “not so much for us parents!” The man from Time Out called his “deeply, deeply uncomfortable”. Both were right, it turned out, at the same time, in our family. The children were asleep in eleven minutes. My husband’s self-inflating mattress, which cost more than the tickets, was flat by one.
3.10am. I lay on my back and counted the whale’s ribs, got three different totals and became anxious about the fixings, which is not a thing I had ever previously been anxious about and is now, apparently, mine for life. Beside me the youngest said, clearly, “It moved,” and went back to sleep. Nobody has ever been more awake than I was at 3.11.
8am. Breakfast. At the Weald & Downland Living Museum in May 2024, thirty Year 6 girls from Portsmouth High School slept in a fifteenth-century hall house and agreed the night was worth the hard floor, the chill and the strange noises. One of them asked, “Can we stay over again tonight?” Over a croissant, the youngest asked exactly the same thing. My husband, grey, said, “We’ll see,” which in our house means no.
So, my review. Was it super expensive? Yes. Did we actually sleep? No. Will we go again? I have booked the Science Museum. I want the astronauts.
Sources
- Susan, A night at the Museum. Literally., Educate Away, 3 September 2021
- Andrzej Lukowski, Astronights at the Science Museum, Time Out, 9 September 2024
- Weald & Downland Living Museum, A Night at the Museum, 5 June 2024
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column