The secret life of Tim Hunkin

Tim Hunkin, a 5-foot-6, 74-year-old man in a boiler suit and watchcap, is inspecting his latest machine, a contraption called ‘Revolution’. As with all of Hunkin’s machines, you never know what’s coming until you turn it on. “I made this work in a week,” he says, handing me a pound coin, “but then I spent months trying to make it reliable.” I feed the coin into a slot. There’s a whirring sound, a click, and a voice — Hunkin’s voice — greets me from somewhere inside the mechanism:

People are fed up. They keep getting poorer, and politicians haven't managed to help. Meanwhile, the rich keep getting richer and richer. The injustice is stark. If we can't make everyone richer, we can at least make the rich poorer. It's time for revolution. Time to fight the stench of entitlement and humble the super rich. To do your bit, press the button to drop the ball onto one of the targets. 

With immaculate timing, I successfully land the metal ball in a target marked ‘golf course’. From there, it’s deposited onto a slide and moves unpredictably down the structure, eventually crashing into a papier-mâché golfer, which rotates like a target at a fairground rifle range to become a street sweeper. Hunkin is planning to send ‘Revolution’ down to London, but first it has to be tuned here in Southwold, a seaside town in Suffolk. (My taxi driver called it “Kensington-on-sea”.) Southwold Pier acts as a proving ground for Hunkin’s creations before they end up in Novelty Automation — his London arcade on Princeton Street, just off High Holborn.   

Novelty Automation celebrates its ten-year anniversary in February, which is partly why the reclusive inventor has agreed to talk to me. Usually people have to intuit his personality and beliefs through his machines. It’s difficult to describe just how authentically unconventional these are. Hunkin, who grew up in London, sees Novelty Automation as a continuation of the capital’s tradition of mass-entertainment exhibitions. It’s as close as you’ll get to witnessing one of Wallace and Gromit’s breakfast contraptions, except instead of making toast, they force you to climb a ‘housing ladder’ or spin a ‘pet or meat’ wheel to decide the fate of an animatronic lamb. 

Like Swift or Hogarth before him, Hunkin belongs to a longstanding tradition of satirising the capital. His creations point out the absurdity of modern life. “I'm not really very political,” he says, opening up a circuit box on a machine that lets you kill cyclists with an armoured 4x4. “My machines are more like conversations you might have in a pub with friends, rather than writing an essay. They’re not backed by evidence … it's just a gut feeling that something isn't right.” I ask if he ever feels the absurdity of the world is growing too great, and whether satire is buckling under it. “No, I think there are just endless targets.” 

Sometimes, Hunkin’s targets are confronted by their own warped reflection. One of the first machines he made for Novelty Automation is called ‘Money Laundering’: players pick up cash from the gutter using a magnetised crane and deposit it in the City of London without regulators noticing. One day, Hunkin says, “some guys from the Financial Conduct Authority turned up. … They came up to say hello afterwards and told me it was great, but actually, I'd made it far too hard.” Likewise, solicitors from the law firm round the corner regularly come in to play his divorce simulation machine, where an angry couple compete to wrestle a terraced house from each other. An attraction named ‘Is It Art?’, in which visitors insert whatever they happen to have in their pockets into a hatch where it’s carried up and presented to a robotic version of art historian Nicholas Serota, was eventually played by Serota’s daughter, who “seemed to enjoy it”.