Review: Visiting KidZania London to learn about real-life jobs

I regularly think about how lucky the children are to be growing up in London, and visiting KidZania, which we had been invited to review, is again one of those attractions that remind us about the first-class experiences on offer to London families.

KidZania is located inside the shopping centre Westfield London, and it is designed as an indoor city run by children. It basically takes pretend play to a new level, and makes it relevant to older children.

The city features mini versions of a supermarket, a hospital, a university, a police station, a bank, a sports stadium, a theatre, a tour bus, a newspaper, a dental office, a petrol station, a burger restaurant and much more. At each of these outlets, it is the children who can do the jobs and earn salaries–or pay for their training–while grown-ups can take a step back and mainly sit outside each experience and wait.

We turned up for our review visit at 9.30am when KidZania opened on Saturday, and before entering the children were given some Kidzos – the currency used in KidZania – to get them started. For the first hour it was easy to find jobs to do with no queuing, and each job experience took around 10-20 minutes to complete.

We tried to avoid queuing up for a job straight after a job experience had started, as each activity is typically done in a small group and it would then be a case of waiting for at least the duration of that activity. After around two hours KidZania felt very busy, but by this time the children had already completed seven to eight varied job-based activities.

They had tried looking after babies in the hospital, washing cars at the service station, fixing teeth as dentists, delivering parcels for the courier service, delivering KidZos as vault guards and serving food and welcoming customers on board a plane as cabin crew. In addition, we had taken a break looking at books in the library, and one had been a shopper in the supermarket, while the other one was in the pet wellbeing centre and also worked in the fruit and nut bar makery.

While all this was going on, Daddy T and I had been standing outside peeking through the glass doors and regularly finding ourselves repeating the same sentence: “I would have loved this as a child!”

I feel the children get to do things they love that we simply wouldn’t think of doing at home, such as squirting water on cars at the service station, while also learning a lot about the world around them. I keep being impressed with the variety of jobs on offer, and every time we’ve been, we’ve had a different experience as KidZania regularly introduces new activities and the children are interested in trying different jobs each time.

One of the highlights is earning Kidzos, which can be spent in the shop after the exit. There’s limited choice of things to buy, but it’s also possible to deposit the Kidzos in the city and keep them on a card, which I tried to encourage as it seemed like a good way to learn about the concept of debit cards.

In my view, there are endless learning possibilities in KidZania for children who are at the right age for the small group-based educational experiences. The majority of job-based activities are open for children aged 4 and over, but some have other age limits.

Considering the fact KidZania is extremely popular with children and teaches them about different careers and jobs people do, this is one attraction I expect us to visit a number of times in the years to come.

Tags: Attraction, KidZania, London, Review, Westfield