At Tim Hunkin’s Workshop

Tim Hunkin at work on his Small Hadron Collider

Apart from the brief trauma of getting locked in the lavatory, it was a relatively uneventful rail journey from Liverpool St up to Suffolk to visit the workshop of Engineer & Cartoonist Tim Hunkin beside the estuary of the river Blythe. A bumpy ride in Tim’s van along the pot-holed track only served to heighten my expectation as we arrived at the water’s edge, where a vast expanse of mud stretched to the horizon reflecting the dramatic East Anglian sky.

A statue of Michael Faraday, parked beside an enormous clock face, a hen coop and a giant pocket calculator, welcomes you the world of Tim Hunkin. Since 1976, Tim has lived here in a cottage at the end of a long brick farmhouse and worked in a series of venerable black weatherboarded sheds. “Back then, The Observer agreed to pay my train fare to London once a fortnight,” he explained, “and that meant I was able to leave London and come to live out here.”

For decades, Tim contributed his Rudiments of Wisdom cartoon strip to the Sunday magazine, but gradually the slot machines took over and now he has two arcades of them – The Under the Pier Show in Southwold and the newly-opened, Novelty Automation in Holborn.

It was a humbling experience to enter the lair of the great inventor and observe him at work. All around were fragments of mechanical devices and intriguing pieces of junk that might one day contribute to one of his creations. Over nearly forty years, Tim has got everything nicely organised, with a wood workshop, a metal workshop, an engineering shop, all kinds of machines, and vast stocks of timber, metal and other stuff.

In spite of the apparent chaos, it is obvious that Tim knows where everything is and can lay his hand upon anything he might require at a moment’s notice. “I’m happiest when I am here in my workshop,” he confided to me and I was startled by the beauty of this unlikely factory, surrounded by trees coming into blossom and all the lush plant growth at the beginning of summer.

The premise of my visit was to view Tim’s latest invention, his Small Hadron Collider which is being unveiled at Novelty Automation in London today and you can go along to try for yourself from tomorrow. Conceived as a satire upon the bizarre world of Particle Physics, it is a based upon a seventies Japanese Patchinko machine that Tim imported from America.

After taking it apart and putting it back together again, Tim created various functions of his own devising and added flip signs with slogans from the world of Quantum Dynamics. Thus Tim’s machine permits even the entirely uneducated individual to have a lot of fun ‘playing’ at Particle Physics and, with only a modicum of application, it is possible to win a Nobel Prize. Who ever dreamed that Scientific Theory could offer such idle amusement?

Whenever Tim finds himself at a loose end or in need of inspiration, he jumps into his old van, negotiates the bumpy track and drives over to enjoy the laughter of visitors at his arcade on the pier at Southwold. I had the privilege of accompanying him that day and, even on a weekday in early summer, we discovered a lively throng. Most remarkable to me was the woman who took a break from walking her dogs to enjoy the dog-walking machine while her patient husband stood holding the leads. Dumbstruck with wonder, I stood contemplating the profound implication of this curious spectacle.

This woman loved walking her dogs so much that she could not resist Tim’s dog-walking machine which offered a virtual experience of equal or superior quality to actual dog-walking. It was the perfect metaphor of our paradoxical relationship with technology and a personal triumph for Tim.