Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience

On Saturday I took baby K and my niece (my mum's cousin's granddaughter to be precise) to Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience at The Boiler House on Brick Lane in Shoreditch.

I hadn't been to Brick Lane in a while and it felt good to be back. This is one of the places that really made me fall in love with London, it has such a cool vibe.

The Claude Monet exhibit was quite small, but the music & light installation at the end was a lovely sensory experience, especially for babies.

I'm glad K was entertained for a bit because you have to be content to just sit and take the scenery and music in for at least 15 mins to get some different scenes.

The Monet Expo has been held at multiple locations across the world, so the images advertised did not exactly match the setup in London.

For example the room with the pond only had one bridge with a square pond off to one side. Looking back at the promotional material (see below on the left) it felt like half the installation was missing.

After the light & music installation, there was a colouring corner, but baby had enough at that point so we went straight out.

Note there was another Claude Monet VR experience available before exiting through the gift shop, but this wasn't included in the price so you'd have to pay another £3.

It was a nice experience, but I felt it relied heavily on the novelty of the light projections. If you've been to these kind of installations before you might skip this one, because I don't think it was best in class. It bothered me that some kind of brand logo would periodically show up in one corner - like those TVs do while in showroom mode at the Media Markt.

I've seen better "immersive experiences" at The Now Building right outside of Tottenham Court Road station, and those experiences are free.

If you go with a baby you're kind of getting 2 for 1, so it makes the £21 admission (on the weekend, £17 during weekdays) more digestible. It's £13.90 for children aged 4 to 12 and honestly not sure if it would have been worth it. I know for a fact that T would have been bored within 5 mins and would have wanted to run around. So I would recommend this for anyone with a baby and diehard Monet fans, but maybe not for toddlers or people with higher expecations.

After the expo we went to Old Spitalfields Market for lunch. It was just a 7 minute walk from the venue.

I had seen the Crunch toasties on Instagram ages ago, and I had marked the location on my Google Maps as "want to go" - it's perfect for occassions like this when you happen to be in the area.

The food did not disappoint! I forgot the names of our sandwiches but we went for chicken, beef and the layered fried potato cubes.

Finally we topped the day off with a delicious dessert from Humble Crumble. You can mix and match your own crumble. We went for a classic apple crumble with hot custard and custard ice cream. It was a treat!

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x Xandra