Activity Quest: Days out and crafts for kids

Adam is standing outside a public toilet next to the Monument in the City of London. Except it isn't a toilet any more... It's the Monument Micro Museum, a brand new museum all about the Great Fire of London, and it might just be the smallest museum in the world.

Will, who spent three years making it, shows Adam round. Inside there's a flame exhibition and a giant map where a tiny spark grows and spreads across the city, telling the story of the three days in 1666 when most of the City of London burnt down. City of London guide David Harry, better known as The London Spy, explains why this corner of London is so old, from Roman Londinium to the Emperor Claudius bringing elephants across the sea. And there's a surprise: a secret laboratory hidden under the Monument, built by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke so they could look up at the stars!

PLUS: Bex and Dan follow the clues to Pudding Lane in a taste of our free Time Hunters walk around the City of London, and meet a baker who swears the fire wasn't his fault.

The Monument Micro Museum is free and open every day from 10am to 5.30pm. Find out more by searching for Monument Micro Museum.

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Adam climbs a narrow spiral staircase, fifty-two steps of it, into the roof of an old church by London Bridge. Up there is the oldest surviving operating theatre in Europe...

It was built in 1822, in the attic where the hospital apothecaries had been drying their herbs, because the space sat right next to the women's ward and had a big skylight to operate under. It closed in 1862 when the hospital moved, was boarded up, and nobody set foot in it again until a researcher found it in 1956. Adam meets Dr Monica Walker for a look at how surgery worked before anaesthetic and before anyone knew about germs, which is not for the faint-hearted. Next door the Herb Garret is still full of the plants they used as medicine.

It is open Thursday to Sunday, 10.30am to 5pm, with last entry at 4.15pm. The spiral staircase is the usual way in, but there is an accessible entrance if you ring ahead.

Find out more by searching for the Old Operating Theatre Museum.

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Adam is in Bloomsbury this week, at the Grant Museum of Zoology. It is part of University College London, it is one room, and that room is packed floor to ceiling with skeletons, jars and glass cases...

It is one of the few university zoology museums left in the country, which means the collection was put together to teach with rather than to show off, and it still feels like that. There is a famous jar of moles, which is exactly what it sounds like. There is a free audio tour with ten stops if you want the stories behind the specimens, and a shop selling 3D-printed bones.

Best of all, it is free to get in. It is open Tuesday to Saturday, one o'clock until five, and it is a couple of minutes' walk from Euston Square.

Find out more by searching for the Grant Museum of Zoology.

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Bex heads to the Postal Museum in Clerkenwell, and then underneath it. Mail Rail is a tiny railway built to carry post across London, running in tunnels below the streets since the 1920s, and you get to ride through the original tunnels on a train that runs on the same track...

Up above, the museum tells the story of the post itself, and there is Sorted!, an indoor play space for children aged one to eight. A ticket covers the Mail Rail ride and a full year of entry to the museum. It is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm, with the last ride down at 4pm.

PLUS: a trip to the Royal Observatory Greenwich to find out exactly what is going on during a partial solar eclipse.

Find out more by searching for the Postal Museum.

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Adam is in Notting Hill this week, at a museum made almost entirely of the things most people throw away. The Museum of Brands has kept the packaging: cereal boxes, sweet wrappers, toys, comics and adverts going back to the Victorians...

The heart of it is the Time Tunnel, a corridor that starts in the 1800s and walks you forward decade by decade, so you can watch the same products change shape as you go. Grown-ups tend to stop dead in front of whichever decade they grew up in, which is half the fun. There are family trails to pick up on the way round, a garden out the back and a cafe.

It is on Lancaster Road in Notting Hill, open Monday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm, and Sundays from 11am.

Find out more by searching for the Museum of Brands.

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Adam visits Oxford Castle and Prison to step back in time and explore the city's past.

There has been something standing on this spot for a thousand years, and a costumed guide walks you through the lot, from Viking raids and the Norman conquest to the beginnings of education in Oxford and the city's long history of crime and punishment. The buildings were still a working prison until 1996, so the cells are the real thing rather than a reconstruction... There is a climb up St George's Tower for a view out across the rooftops, and the castle mound next door is free to walk up whenever you like.

It is open every day from 10am to 5pm, with tours setting off every fifteen to thirty minutes. Under fives go free, although they are not allowed up the tower.

Find out more by searching for Oxford Castle and Prison.

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Adam is off to Forest Hill in south London for the Horniman Museum and Gardens, and the curious tale of a very overstuffed walrus...

The walrus arrived in London in Victorian times, and the story goes that the taxidermist who prepared it had never seen a live one, so he filled out every last wrinkle until it ended up smooth, round and enormous. It has been a south London favourite ever since. There is far more to the Horniman than the walrus though. The World Gallery is packed with objects from across the globe, there is a famous collection of musical instruments, an aquarium and a butterfly house, an Animal Walk that opens in the afternoons, and sixteen acres of gardens with a view right across London.

One thing to know before you go: the Natural History Gallery is closed while it is redeveloped, and the walrus is off display until it reopens, currently expected in early 2027. The museum and gardens are free to visit, and the aquarium and butterfly house are ticketed.

Find out more by searching for the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

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This week Adam is wandering around the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, finding out what is on offer for visitors of every age.

The Ashmolean opened its doors in 1683, which makes it the first public museum in Britain, and what is inside now covers half a million years of art and archaeology. Egyptian mummies, Greek and Roman sculpture, treasures from Asia and paintings from the last hundred years all sit under one roof, arranged so you can wander from the ancient world right up to the present day...

Entry is free and it is open every day from 10am, with last entry at 4.45pm. Families can pick up a trail or an explorer pack from the Welcome Desk on the way in, there is a Gallery Adventure to follow around the galleries, and on Saturdays volunteers in the Money Gallery bring out coins from all over the world for visitors to handle.

Find out more by searching for the Ashmolean Museum.

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Adam heads into the City of London and then goes down, well below the modern pavements, to investigate the capital's Roman past at the London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE.

Underneath the building is the temple of Mithras, put up by Roman Londoners around 1,800 years ago and dug up again in the 1950s. It has been rebuilt on the spot where it was found, and it is brought to life with light, haze and sound so you get a sense of what it might have felt like to step inside all those centuries ago... Upstairs there is a wall of objects pulled out of the ground when the site was excavated, and a changing contemporary art commission that responds to the history underneath.

Best of all, it is completely free to visit, although it is worth booking a slot before you go. It is open Tuesday to Saturday and on Sunday afternoons, and closed on Mondays.

Find out more by searching for London Mithraeum.

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Adam is off to Bedfordshire for a day at Woburn Safari Park, and he has landed one of the park's very special VIP experiences. That means getting far closer to the animals than most visitors ever manage, including the moment he gets to feed the giraffes...

Woburn comes in two halves. On the Road Safari you stay in the car and drive slowly through the reserves, with rhino, bears, tigers, lions, zebra, monkeys and elephants on the other side of the window, and you can go round as many times as you like. Then you park up for the Foot Safari, where there are walk-through enclosures, keeper talks and feeding demonstrations through the day, and animals including lemurs, meerkats, sea lions and penguins. There is plenty besides the animals too, from the Great Woburn Railway to the Mammoth Play Ark indoor play area and the Go Ape treetop course.

The park is open every day, with last entry at 5pm and the gates closing at 6pm.

Find out more by searching for Woburn Safari Park.

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Adam heads to Filton on the northern edge of Bristol, where a First World War airfield has become Aerospace Bristol, a museum telling the story of more than a hundred years of flying. This is a place where aeroplanes were designed and built for a century, and the galleries take you from the flimsy wood and canvas machines of the early 1900s right through to helicopters, rockets and missiles.

The star of the show sits in a hangar all of her own: Concorde Alpha Foxtrot, the very last Concorde ever built and the very last one to fly. Adam gets up close to the fastest passenger plane there has ever been and finds out why she flew home to Filton in 2003 and never took off again.

He also visits the conservation workshop, a Grade II listed hangar put up around 1915, where volunteers are slowly bringing a Second World War Bristol bomber back to life, piece by piece, in front of visitors. There are hands-on exhibits, trails for younger explorers and an outdoor play area too, so it is an easy few hours out whatever the weather is doing.

Aerospace Bristol is open seven days a week. Find out more by searching for Aerospace Bristol.

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Adam heads to Topgolf, a driving range with a twist, where golf gets mixed up with a bit of darts and a bit of bowling. You don’t need to have played before and you don’t need your own clubs, because everyone gets a bay, a set of clubs to borrow and a screen keeping score.

The clever bit is the golf balls. Every single one has a tiny microchip inside it, so when you whack it out into the outfield the giant targets know exactly which ball was yours and where it landed. Your points pop up on the screen a second later, and the further away the target and the closer to the middle you land, the more you score.

Adam takes on the targets to find out whether he’s any good, and it turns out this is a game where you can be pretty terrible at golf and still have a brilliant time. It’s a good one for the summer holidays too, because the bays are covered, so a bit of rain doesn’t stop play. Topgolf has venues around the UK, and you can find your nearest one by searching for Topgolf.

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Bex sends Dan to Greenwich for a face your fears challenge, and he turns up on the riverside with no idea what is coming. Inside his envelope is the mission: climb to the top of the Cutty Sark, the famous tea clipper that once raced tea leaves from Asia to Europe and now sits in dry dock in south London. The problem is that Dan is terrified of heights, and so is producer Paul!

Strapped into harnesses, safety lines and heart rate monitors, they head up the ratlines, the rope ladders that sailors once climbed with nothing attached to them at all. The Cutty Sark Rig Climb Experience takes you to the tops platform and then out along the lower topsail yard, around 21 metres above the main deck, with huge views across the Thames and London.

Getting down is the strangest bit, because you lean back, take your hands off the ropes and get winched gently to the deck. Does Dan's heart rate survive? Climbers need to be at least 8 years old, and you can find out more by searching for Cutty Sark Rig Climb Experience.

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Bex sends Adam back to the 15th century as he visits the Loxwood Joust, an entire medieval fantasy kingdom hidden away in an ancient woodland at Loxwood, right on the West Sussex and Surrey border.

You park your car in the 21st century, walk through a marquee, and come out somewhere completely different!

Adam meets founder Morris Bacon, who runs the event with his son Danny, to hear how a small family medieval festival grew over 14 years into one of the biggest events of its kind in the UK, with an artistic director, actors as well as reenactors, and proper storylines you can join in with.

Along the way there are witches, a talking wall, a working replica of the rack from the Tower of London, blacksmiths and scribes to have a go with, archery, axe throwing, a jester, puppets, and a band all the way from Spain called Trobar de Morte.

Adam also watches the Meat Grinder, where around forty fighters in full armour charge at each other with swords and axes! The Loxwood Joust runs across the first three weekends of August.

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Bex gets a rare peek inside the London Transport Museum's depot in Acton, usually open only a few weekends a year.

She rides a 1938 underground train, explores six zones of transport history from old horse drawn omnibuses to trams, and gets the full scoop from Steph on what families can expect from the depot's special open days this August.

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Adam swaps the studio for the galleries as he heads to the National Portrait Gallery, right in the heart of London — just around the corner from Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square. It's a place that tells the story of Britain through portraits, and Adam's there to find out exactly what's on offer for families.

He's joined by Juno, the gallery's Families and Young People's Programme Manager, who takes him from the Tudors all the way through to the present day. Along the way they puzzle over the beautifully ornate frame around Sir Anthony van Dyck's self-portrait (see if you can spot the hidden sunflower!), meet a painted bronze sculpture of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, and talk all things Henry VIII and his six wives — the stars of the gallery's Six Lives exhibition.

Adam also catches up with some of the families exploring the gallery, having a go at trails like History Detectives — cracking word puzzles and hunting for tiny details hidden in the paintings.

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ex sends Adam to the Royal Society in the heart of London for the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, where the very best of British science is on show.

The room is bursting with things to discover, from telescopes hunting for invisible dark matter to Oxford robots learning to stack cups and whole universes being built inside a computer. Adam meets cosmologist Sir Carlos Frenk, a scientist who studies the entire universe — galaxies, planets, stars and everything in between. Carlos shows off his exhibit, Galaxy Makers, which reveals how you build a galaxy like our own Milky Way... and even how the Moon was made by firing an asteroid at the Earth!

Along the way, Carlos explains why scientists are just normal people (who tell jokes and sometimes get a bit sweaty), how a night under the stars in the Mexican jungle set him on his path, and one of the biggest questions science still can't answer: are we alone in the universe?

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Dan visits the iconic Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), a Wimbledon fan’s dream, for a one-on-one coaching session with top tennis pro Sam at the National Tennis Centre. Find out what it’s like to train where the pros play, learn about the new LTA Youth programme designed to help kids fall in love with tennis, and get some simple drills to try at home, even in your living room!

PLUS: It’s Craft Corner! Get ready for some glow-in-the-dark fun as we show you how to make your very own water bottle bowling set using recycled bottles and glow paint, perfect for summer evenings when the sun goes down.

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Bex visits Tate Modern’s new Julio Le Parc exhibition, discovering art you can touch, play with, and experience in surprising ways.

Curator Francis shares behind-the-scenes secrets and inspiration.

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Adam heads to one of England's oldest and most mysterious historical monuments — the world-famous Stonehenge.

Joined by Stonehenge volunteer manager Sue Martindale, Adam explores the 4,500-year-old stone circle, discovering secrets of its prehistoric builders, ancient engineering feats, and the natural phenomenon that draws crowds every year: the solstice alignment.

PLUS: Get creative! Georgia visits to lead you through a craft activity where you’ll make your very own Stonehenge miniature at home.

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