Astronights at the Science Museum

What are the Science Museum’s Astronights?

For whatever reason, the idea of sleeping over at a museum sounds absolutely amazing to the average child. To capitalise on that, the Science Museum’s Astronights is in a very literal sense a sleepover at the museum, synonymous with the Natural History Museum’s probably slightly better known Dinosnores.

What happens on an Astronight?

Aimed at children aged seven to 11, the nights take place once a month, typically on a Friday and are essentially divided into three bits. In the evening there’s a programme of activities between 7pm and 11pm, taking in a series of craft workshops, fun science lectures and other activities. The sleepover takes place between lights out at 11.30pm and lights on at (gulp) 6am. And the next morning there’s a light breakfast followed by access to two of the museum’s most popular attractions, the IMAX and the Wonderlab.

How much do Astronights cost?

Tickets are relatively pricey at £75, given that normally the museum is free admission, though another way of looking at it is that it’s pretty storming value for a night’s B&B in Kensington plus a host of additional activities. You can pay £100 for a slightly comfier VIP option, and as a bonus the 2024 nights are being sponsored by Tempur, who are providing a free pillow to each camper.

Are they any good?

There is zero getting away from the fact that sleeping on a museum floor is deeply, deeply uncomfortable - you’re provided with a thin sleeping mat, and it’s BYO sleeping bag (don’t get any ideas though, because ‘external mattresses’ are very much prohibited). Inevitably it takes a hall of excitable children a while to quieten down. But we all knowingly signed up for this and the relatively late night and relatively early morning means there’s not a huge amount of lying around awake feeling sorry for yourself.

It’s fundamentally cool to be wandering round a deserted museum

That aside, it’s enormous fun, or it was for my eldest - the little workshops set up around the museum are the right balance of educational and entertainment (making plastic shapes, making a solar system bracelet, building a UV torch) and it’s fundamentally cool to be wandering around a deserted museum. The highlight was a 10pm lecture on the digestive tracts of astronauts - informative, funny and just an entertainingly weird thing to be doing in the middle of the night (the night we attended was a SENsory Astronight aimed at children with special educational needs, which has a slightly more relaxed schedule than the usual nights). The next morning’s activities are things you can do at the museum anyway so maybe feel a touch less special, although as I had never successfully made a Wonderlab booking I was very happy with this one (it’s a lot of fun). And it‘s worth saying the museum staff were uniformly excellent, with a friendliness and enthusiasm that bordered on the American.

Basically: don’t in any way delude yourself that it will be comfortable, but in all other respects Astronights is exactly what you’d hope it would be: informative, entertaining and the perfect treat for a studious young person.