Jewry Wall & Roman Baths — Attraction in Great Britain

Visited on a Sunday afternoon at 2.45pm & it shuts at 4pm that day. I was worried about having enough time. The staff are very friendly & welcoming. It starts with an immersive film on 3 walls in a hall. The film is about a young Roman child & people in the public bathhouse. After 10 minutes of scene setting, you move through the museum. It is very much a sensory overload. There are videos just playing all around you. Maybe too many. It is modern & fun, but the videos are always on & you get a bit confused as to what to focus your hearing on. It is super modern, a world away from the old dusty exhibits that the museum used to be. Loved the first mosaic floor display with the amusing video of the floor maker explaining the tesserae quality. There are lots of glass see through displays which my 57 year old eyes found a bit hard to examine without a backdrop. Would be nice to have a display board with blown up pictures with larger print descriptions to make it easier to see. I have been to quite a few Roman museums including in Rome itself. There ought to be more stuff for kids to twiddle with. My kids loved Cirencester Roman museum which was really engaging for them. They had tiles with Latin lettering to sort. I think it needs to be a lot bigger. I hope it develops & changes displays to keep fresh. We were there for just under 1 hour. The cafe stops doing hot drinks 30 minutes before closing, but they did say that cold drinks. & cakes were...

You start with an “immersive experience” which is basically a poor kid getting yelled at by various adults for 15 minutes whilst he travels round Roman Leicester by people not believably dressed for the inclement weather. There’s no context as to where these places are in Leicester and no explanation as to what the various places are. Downstairs is the museum, not enough artifacts on display and nowhere near enough information about what the pieces are (e.g. “a coin” no info as to where it’s from, what it’s made of, how old it is (Roman is a bit vague as the Roman Empire lasted quite a while). Also more videos, this time of people moaning they have too much work to do (mosaic business owner - who wants to listen to that?) Accessibility is truly atrocious for a newly renovated museum; there is one lift just past the “immersive experience” to get downstairs, when you want to leave you have to go back in that lift and you have a choice of a) waiting for the 15 minute video to end or b) disrupting everyone watching to get out. Really not suitable for neurodiverse people due to all the yelling in the video plus the staff trying to get you to wait before leaving to suffer through the video again to not disturb the people watching the video. I love museums, have been to many and this is by far the worst museum I have ever been to. It’s like it’s been dumbed down for the lowest common denominator but still in the least engaging...

A well designed small modern museum which focuses on the history of Ratae Corieltauvorum, the Roman town where Leicester now stands. The visit begins in an audio-visual room, after which you go downstairs and there is a gallery running the length of the building which contains the remains of two large mosaics and a well presented selection of other Roman objects. They seem to have made an effort to make it family friendly with videos of different Roman characters and a couple of interactive games. You can then go outside to see the remains of the Roman bathhouse. As with all Roman British remains, you need to use some imagination, but when we visited there was an excellent guide who explained the site. My Mum is in a wheelchair and could easily access everything except for parts of the bathhouse remains outside, but the cafe upstairs overlooks the whole site.

I understand that at one time this was a free attraction and the negative reviews seem to reflect some local unhappiness that there is now an admission price, but as a visitor to Leicester I felt the price (£12.50 adults, £11.50 concessions, £6.25 children, carers free) was reasonable for what there now is...