We recently had a big day out in London - you can read our full itinerary here. When I was researching things to do, I kept coming across Frameless and I kept being tempted... but it is quite expensive. Online tickets, where you book a specific slot, start from £28 for adults, or £34 if you want flexibility as to when on the day you turn up. (I booked tickets whilst we were at the Postal Museum so I knew what time we'd arrive there.) That's a lot of money for an experience you're not going to be at much more than 2 hours - especially when you add it up for a family of 5. (They have got a family ticket, and various other options - but they're all plenty of money.)
However, on this day out, I was - very unusually - adventuring with just my youngest 2. We'd dropped my husband and eldest at a Writer's conference in the morning and so with just 1 adult and 1 child ticket to buy (as the 2 year old was free), we paid just over £50. A lot, but better than the £80+ it would have been for us all to go on a family ticket.
Frameless
Frameless is very close to Marble Arch and Oxford Street, so it's a very easy location to get to. Unless you've got a push chair on the tube, then 2 adults are handy, but overall, it's very easy to find. When you arrive they check your ticket - I seem to remember I had some issue with my email, like the confirmation hadn't come through by the time we got there as I'd only just booked it, but it was all fine.
And then, if you're on foot, you go down a short escalator surrounded by coloured lights. The immersive experience starts straight away which is great - it looked like a very exciting escalator. Unfortunately, because of the push chair, we had to go down in a lift. Which wasn't exciting, but it was available and that felt like a bonus after battling the Underground escalators and stairs.
We kept our push chair with us the whole time, which was really handy because my toddler fell asleep in the first room. But that was a good thing because it meant I could concentrate on the art and not have to entertain him... and he only fell asleep because the first room was so peaceful and mesmerising. Well, it was nap time, but it was also a very magical experience.
4 rooms of immersive art
Frameless is split into 4 different rooms of immersive art, each with a different theme. Signage outside tells you about the theme - or artistic movement - and shows you the famous works of art which you're about to see brought to life. You'll probably recognise quite a few of them, but it really doesn't matter if you do or you don't.
Surrealists
The first room, and probably our favourite, was the Surrealists room in the exhibition called "Beyond Reality". This room featured work by Ernst and Dalí inspired by Sigmund Freud, but also earlier work by Renaissance artists such as Arcimboldo and Bosh (sometimes referrred to as Proto-Surrealists), as well as Symbolist 19th Century work by Klimt and Munch.
This room was basically a massive room of mirrors - on the ceiling, on the floor, and on pillars in the room - and it made you feel like you were in a kaleidoscope... but in a good way! We walked in and gasped - it was mesmerising. You could wander around the room or you could just sit on the floor and watch. The famous works of art are basically animated and they move and merge across the ceiling and walls. The film is on a loop so you can stay and watch the whole thing - each room says outside how long it takes and I think this room was just over 20 minutes. There's of course also loud atmospheric music playing in time with the film to make it all extremely all consuming. (But it wasn't loud enough to stop my 2 year old falling asleep!)
Abtract
The next room was called "The Art of Abstraction", featuring the works of people such as Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian. I remember being impressed as soon as you walked it in that it was very different to the previous room, and how that made the whole attraction feel more considered than I had expected, but it didn't excite us like the first room. I think this one it felt harder to stand and watch without feeling like you were in someone's way, and overall it just wasn't quite as "all consuming" (in a good, enveloping way!).
Impressionists
Next was "Colour in Motion", with work from Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists (Pointillism) and Post-Impressionists. We're talking Monet, Seurat, Signac and Van Gogh. This room was very exciting for my 6 year old as it was interactive.
Brush strokes would appear on the floor, shaped like leaves or petals, and you could actually walk across the floor and they'd move our of your way. So, projections, or videos or animations or whatever would be the correct technical term would appear and you could kick them to move them, or brush them aside. You could see people come in, watch it for a while, and then realise that they were actually influencing the animation from where they were stood - which was really really clever.
The shapes would then glide across the floor and up onto the walls and eventually you'd realise they were building famous works of art. It was really well done and whilst not as magically emersive as the first room, it was very impressive and my daughter happily stayed there for ages kicking paint strokes around.
Landscape Art
The final room takes you on a journey through 4 pieces of landscape art from the Baroque and Romantic periods, bringing to life space, a forest, the sea and Piazza di San Marco. Across the walls, ceiling and floor, the scenes are built around you, with of course suitable backing tracks, so that you really do find yourself in the heart of a storm at sea, or in the middle of space. I'd be torn between whether this was my favourite room or the first one, as it was really effectively done.
Immersive and special
We doubled back into the first room before we left. I think each room is between 15 - 25 minutes (I'm afraid I can't remember exactly now) so if you watched each room once, in total it would take you around 80 minutes. I think we were probably there about that long, but I could have watched some of them again.
With regards to whether it was worth the money - I paid just over £50 for 3 of us to go (one slept through most of it) and I'd say yes, it was worth it, as my daughter and I really enjoyed it, I've not seen anything like it at all, and we still talk about it 6 months on. For both of us it was a highlight of 2024. I'm not sure if my husband would have enjoyed it as much, so if we'd paid an additional £30 for him, the value might have gone down a little...
It's so hard to say whether something is "worth" what it's priced at as money has different values to different people, but if you like being surrounded by overwhelming music and lights, with the lights in time to the music - which I've realised this year I really do, thanks to Frameless and Luxmuralis, then this is worth a lot. I appreciate that sounds quite niche - lights and music - but really, getting lost in the moment at a concert or feeling the orchestra thump in your chest at the theatre has a similar vibe. It also struck me whilst we were there what a great way it is to experience art if you're a fan but have done the main galleries in London to death and are looking for a change. Hvaing said that, we weren't so impressed by Outernet - London's big free immersive experience - as that's outside and so didn't have the all-encompassing feeling of getting lost in the moment.
We stopped for a drink of water in the cafe, and for a loo break (yes there are toilets at Frameless) before carrying on with our adventure down Oxford Street, and I noticed that they do cocktail making events and adult only evenings there - it would be a pretty special venue for an event.
The thoughts and views expressed in this blog post are the author’s own and not that of Activibees.com or it's operators.
