It's all down-hill from here (it's to do with the flooring!) (National Marine Aquarium)

Member Name: bruffyboy

Product:	National Marine Aquarium
Date:	07/04/09 (58 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: lots of fish

Disadvantages: dark

The National Marine Aquarium is situated in the Barbican area of Plymouth. As it's the Easter holidays, we decided it was a good time to take the boys and check this place out.

They have a very good website that informed us we could get 20% off by booking online (so there's my first tip). However, we decided to pay around double and get a year-long family membership, giving unlimited trips for 12 months. At the very least, we'll go a couple of times this holiday, so it'll make up for it within that. Prices vary, but it's free for under 5s, and adults are around £10, with family year long membership (2 adults, 2 kids) for £40.

The aquarium requires you to start at the top and work your way down the huge building, through different zones based on different parts of the world. The first floor is made up of very dull 'interactive' equipment, such as watching some video clips and pressing a button when it says to. I have to say this areas was a real let-down, and we soon zoomed on to find the fish.

In terms of fish, there are 400 different species held in 50 different tanks. The tanks range from open topped ones that you can peer over, to huge tanks that are the size of a house. At points, the fish are swimming over you, which is pretty cool I have to say.

Now, I'm not a fish expert, but I can say that there were lots of fish of different sizes, shapes and colours. There were also turtles, lobsters, crabs and sharks. The only let-down in terms of fish was how the sharks were pretty small (a couple of feet at the most). Each tank has a small LCD screen telling you all about what's in it.

On a down-side, everything is set at teen to adult height, so I had to carry my two year old the whole way round - bear that in mind!

Anyway, the whole building is very dark, and this makes for some issues concerning keeping track of your kids who can quite easily disappear into the darkened crowd, so I would say that is also something to take into consideration.

Along the way, the walls are decorated with art-work ranging from mosaics to sculptures, which are all very nice.

The journey ends at the gift shop (convenient). I would say it takes one and a half hours to see everything, not the three hours the website suggests.

All in all, a nice enough day out with a few issues that require some thinking from parents.




** see http://www.national-aquarium.co.uk/ for more information

Summary: worth a trip