Review: The Timewalk Exhibition
- Immersive Rumours
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
The world premiere of this new immersive exhibition from DEM Museums is visually impressive but lacks the depth many have come to expect from this kind of experience.
Photo: The Timewalk Exhibition
The Timewalk Exhibition, produced by Türkiye-based DEM Museums, is the company's debut immersive exhibition in the UK. Running at Immerse LDN below Excel London until 30th September 2026, the 60-minute-long experience invites guests to step back in time and learn about ancient civilisations through 360° projections, spatial sound and cinematic storytelling.
It's the latest in a long line of immersive exhibitions to arrive in London in the last few years, with its launch coming just weeks after the final days of Cleopatra: The Immersive Experience just a few doors down at Immerse LDN and Vikings: The Immersive Experience at Canada Water's DockX.
Regardless of whether they focused on Tutankhamun, the Titanic, Pompeii or the Viking Age, all of London's recent large-scale immersive exhibitions have followed a similar structure of museum-like displays, VR sequences and immersive projections. Clearly it's a formula that works, with the exhibitions collectively welcoming hundreds of thousands of guests through their doors, but after so many in such a short amount of time, it's quickly turned into a case of diminishing returns, with each one feeling less impactful than the last.
Photo: The Timewalk Exhibition
With Timewalk, DEM has taken a decidedly different approach to creating an immersive exhibition. They've done away with VR sequences entirely, made traditional museum-style educational content a lower priority, and placed the all-encompassing visuals that typically only make up one part of other immersive exhibitions at the centre of the experience.
If this wasn't already a pretty radical departure from the norm, they also decided to expand the exhibition's scope well outside just a single historical figure or moment in time and have instead set their sights on something much bigger - covering 12,000 years of human history.
Photo: The Timewalk Exhibition
The experience begins with guests picking up a personal audio guide (the English narration is provided by David Schofield and Olivia Williams, but the experience's narration is also available in 24 other languages, alongside a version for children) and walking through an arched hallway of constantly moving nebulas, stars, and flowing sand-like particles.
On the other side of the tunnel, guests emerge into a space housing a couple dozen stone monoliths. Inside are replicas of glyphs, stone heads, and vessels, which all directly tie into an ancient civilisation. Unless you hold a PhD on the matter, many of the civilisations explored will likely be unfamiliar, with everything from the Shang, Zapotec, and Sumerians featuring.
In place of traditional object labels, all of the information available about these civilisations comes through guests' audio guides, which are triggered by placing the device against an RFID-enabled icon engraved into each monolith. This option is briefly explained during the audio introduction, but it's not all that intuitive thanks to each monolith also having half a dozen other engravings alongside the audio guide icon.
Anyone hoping to take their time and engage with each monolith will struggle, as after a set amount of time the lights in the space dim and wrap-around screens burst to life, showing AI-enhanced scenes of the earliest human civilisations and groups working to erect monuments and places of worship in 9000 BC Göbeklitepe.
As a moment in human history, it's significant, suggesting that religion and communal worship were the driving forces behind civilisations being formed, not agriculture; but just as soon as the audio guide begins to explore this idea, the screens fade out to a sea of the already familiar sand-like particles, and everyone in the space is ushered into the next room to learn about another civilisation.
Photo: The Timewalk Exhibition
From here on out, the museum-like monoliths make way for a series of four 360° immersive projection rooms, which each explore a different civilisation - ancient Maya, the city of Babylon, Egypt, and Rapa Nui (more commonly known today as Easter Island).
At the centre of each room is a striking wire-frame centrepiece relating to the subject matter being projected. For the section on Babylon, it’s a scale replica of the Ishtar Gate; for Egypt, it’s a boat cruising up the Nile. Maya has several tree trunks, denoting the forest that was crucial to their way of life, and for Rapa Nui there’s a monolithic moai statue.
While none of them can match the spectacle of Vikings: The Immersive Experience's life-size Viking longship, which guests were welcome to climb aboard, they're a welcome addition to the experience, which would otherwise feel devoid of anything physical and tangible besides a smattering of cube stools for a large chunk of its run time.
Photo: The Timewalk Exhibition
Visually, the projections that feature in each of these four main immersive spaces are pretty stunning and feel like a step above what's on offer at many other recent immersive exhibitions, but the scope of the exhibition's subject matter means that the amount of educational content and detail on offer is far less than what was available in the first room through the monoliths. By the time each of the four main civilisations has been introduced in their respective rooms, things seem to wrap up, and it's on to the next space.
The show's conclusion, which looks to connect all of the civilisations covered through their commonalities and influence on one another, is fairly effective at highlighting how ultimately every society was looking to build something that lasts, honour their past and be remembered, but when each civilisation featured gets at best a brief overview, Timewalk ultimately falls short of doing them justice.
★★★
[Tickets gifted in exchange for an honest review]
The Timewalk Exhibition runs at Immerse LDN near Custom House station until 30th September 2026. General admission tickets are priced from £28.50 for Adults and £22.70 for Children. For more information and to book tickets, visit timewalkexhibition.com
