About
Eureka! The National Children's Museum in Halifax, West Yorkshire, is the UK's leading museum dedicated to children aged 0 to 11, offering a uniquely immersive, hands-on learning environment where every exhibit is designed to be touched, explored, and experienced. Opened in 1992, Eureka! was a pioneering concept in British museum design, rejecting the conventional 'look but don't touch' philosophy in favour of interactive discovery learning that engages children's natural curiosity and encourages exploration through play.
Spread across 6,500 square metres of purpose-built space, the museum contains more than 400 interactive exhibits across themed 'worlds' that invite children to explore the human body, the natural world, how things work, and how people live together in society. The SoundSpace gallery invites musical experimentation; the Living and Working Together gallery lets children role-play adult occupations including working in a supermarket, bank, and garage; and the Me and My Body gallery explores anatomy through giant interactive displays.
Eureka! has won numerous awards for its educational programming and visitor experience, consistently ranking among the top family attractions in Yorkshire and the North of England. It was the first museum in the UK to dedicate its entire space to children's interactive learning, and its model has influenced children's museums and science discovery centres across Britain and internationally. The museum works closely with schools and early years settings to deliver curriculum-linked visits for children from reception through to primary school.
Located just metres from The Piece Hall in central Halifax, Eureka! occupies a striking custom-built building adjacent to Halifax railway station, making it highly accessible by public transport. Regular visiting exhibitions supplement the permanent galleries, while holiday programmes and special events ensure the museum offers fresh content to repeat visitors throughout the year. Eureka! is accredited by Arts Council England and receives support from the Department for Education, reflecting its significance as a national educational resource.
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Annual Visitors (2019)
350,000
Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
📅 Best Times to Visit
Quietest: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday
Busiest: Saturday, Sunday, Bank Holidays
💡 Weekday mornings during school term time for families; pre-book timed entry during school holidays
Highlights
Living and Working Together
This award-winning gallery allows children to inhabit a miniaturised town and explore what it means to live and work as adults in society. Fully equipped role-play environments include a working supermarket where children scan barcodes and operate tills, a bank where they can manage accounts and make transactions, a garage for car maintenance, and a variety of other community spaces.
The gallery encourages children to develop social skills, mathematical thinking, and an understanding of how communities function.
It remains one of Eureka! 's most popular and celebrated galleries, offering rich role-play scenarios that children can return to repeatedly without exhausting their possibilities.
Me and My Body
The Me and My Body gallery uses giant-scale interactive exhibits to explore human anatomy, physiology, and health in ways that are immediately accessible and deeply engaging for young children. Visitors can crawl through a giant mouth and digestive system, pump a huge model heart, and explore how the senses work through a series of hands-on challenges.
The exhibits transform abstract biological concepts into tangible, physical experiences that children remember long after their visit.
The gallery has been designed in close consultation with health education professionals and aligns with primary school science curricula, making it particularly valuable for school visits as well as family days out.
SoundSpace
SoundSpace is a specially designed gallery dedicated to musical discovery and experimentation, offering children a rare opportunity to make as much noise as they like in an environment purpose-built for sound exploration. Giant percussion instruments, electronic sound-making stations, vocal experimentation chambers, and interactive digital music tools invite children of all musical ability levels to compose, perform, and discover the physics of sound.
The gallery has no 'wrong' answers or required skills — just open-ended musical play that builds confidence, creativity, and an intuitive understanding of how sound works.
SoundSpace is a firm favourite with younger visitors and often becomes the centrepiece of a Eureka! visit.
Invent, Create and Discover
This STEM-focused gallery challenges children to engage with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics through hands-on problem-solving activities. Building challenges, engineering puzzles, coding activities, and scientific experiments encourage children to think like scientists and engineers, developing analytical and creative skills through guided play.
The gallery is regularly updated with new activities that reflect current STEM priorities in education, and is particularly popular with Key Stage 2 school groups.
Children can design and test structures, explore simple machines, and experience the satisfaction of making something that works — building confidence and enthusiasm for STEM subjects.
Collections
Eureka! is an interactive museum rather than a collections-based institution. The museum's primary assets are its 400+ interactive exhibits and purpose-designed learning environments. The museum does hold some object-based displays relating to childhood, toys, and learning, but its educational value derives primarily from its experiential exhibits rather than historical collections.
Living and Working Together
Role-play community gallery with supermarket, bank, garage, and civic spaces
📍 Gallery 1
Me and My Body
Giant-scale interactive exploration of human anatomy and physiology
📍 Gallery 2
SoundSpace
Musical discovery and sound experimentation gallery
📍 Gallery 3
Invent, Create and Discover
STEM challenge gallery with engineering, coding, and science experiments
📍 Gallery 4
Foundation Discovery Zone
Early years sensory and exploratory spaces for children aged 0-5
📍 Foundation Zone
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.