Novelty Automation

At the far end of the Novelty Automation museum, a couple are suffering through a divorce. Not really — these two are probably not even married, such is their youth — but by way of a retro-style arcade game that begins with an angry looking pair of dummy figures fighting over a model house inside a glass cabinet.

- JOSH BARRIE

For a handful of tokens, players are required to spin a handwheel with more speed than their counterpart in a desperate bid to see their side win, signalled by flashing red lights and a greedy share of the home. The fact the end of the game always leads to the splitting in half of the family dog, kids falling out of bedrooms and an irate looking Henry vacuum cleaner wobbling perilously on one side of the newly divided hallway is merely par for the course.

This tug-of-war battle is one of many arcade games at the museum, a little place in a quiet street in Holborn. It is not the sort of venue you would find by happenstance, pocketed behind the ungainly looking Red Lion Square and away from the sleek glass offices along tributary roads — and some distance from The Fryer's Delight, Holborn's famous fish and chip shop and one of only a handful left in London that still fries in beef dripping.

Funny old machines