Sea Life London Aquarium, July 2025

We were in London to make the most of our Merlin Annual Passes, and by this point, we’ve definitely had our moneys worth from them. Merlin stop 2 was to the SeaLife London Aquarium, located in the County Hall building on the South Bank of the Thames under the gaze of the London Eye.

Yes, it is just another SeaLife Centre, so if you’ve seen one, you’ve pretty much seen them all bar a few differences, so I won’t go into detail on every fish and crustacean that we saw, but here’s the highlights:

A standard off-peak ticket will set you back £28 per adult and £25 for children with under 2’s free to enter. On the day prices start at £39. You can also opt for tickets that include the VR experience and as with the other Merlin attractions in the area, you can buy a combo ticket to save money if booking multiple attractions, like the London Eye or Madame Tussauds.

You start your experience buy walking over a glass floor looking down into one of the tanks, with sharks swimming beneath you. We didn’t notice it straight away due to the blue lighting in the room, but its cool once you spot it. A few people get a bit freaked out by the glass floor into a shark tank, but I’m sure its perfectly safe. And its not like there’s Great White sharks in there.

As with Manchester’s Sea Life Centre, the London Aquarium has a large open Ray tank that you can walk around and watch several large fish species swimming freely and bobbing at the surface. The room and tank are decorated with fishing nets and boats. There were some cool things in here, but it felt a bit quiet and slow. The one in Manchester is crazy, with all the fish just flying round in circles and several ray types. This one was half empty with only a few Rays visible. Maybe it was just a more serene version.

Next up was a giant tank that you could see from several angles including the tunnel. There’s always a shark tunnel in a Sea Life centre, and they’re great fun to walk though and see schools of fish, sharks and happy smiling rays passing overhead.

Another massive tank next. This one was home to several massive sharks of a few different varieties – Sand Tiger sharks and Nurse Sharks. This was one of our favourite areas, watching these giants swim around the Moai statue at the centre.

Over in this area was a tank that must have been 30 feet long filled with Clownfish. A whole tank filled with Nemo’s in orange, brown and black floating around in the orangey pink sea anemone carpet that they call home. Other tanks were filled with bright coral and other reef dwelling creatures like Tangs and Butterfly Fish.

We’d seen Lionfish, Crabs, Rays, Sharks, Seahorses and more before stepping out of the oceans for a while, and into the Rainforest.

Over in this section, you could see some of the land-dwelling creatures like Tarantulas – if you could find them. I didn’t look very hard. One thing we did enjoy though was the setup for the Leaf-Cutter Ants. They had one tank where their nest was, containing a series of boxes and rope pathways between. This was linked by a network of tubes, that led around the room so that you could follow the ants walking back and forth collecting leaves and bringing them to the nest. The tank they were retrieving their leaves from had a pop up section that the kids could stand in and watch from the centre of the tank as the ants busily worked around them.

Also in here were snakes, Freshwater Rays, Terrapins and Freshwater Crocodiles, before leading into a room with a tank full of giant Pacu and another filled with Piranha. We got some great views of the Snapping Turtle here before heading into the VR area.

The VR is an up-charged attraction that allows you a taste of what it would be like to swim with sharks or whales. Whilst I’m sure the experience would be cool, the room itself with the illuminated pod seating and dim blue lighting felt like something out of an alien abduction film.

Another mainstay of SeaLife centres are the rock pools. Kids can get hands-on with some starfish and shrimps here, feel what ray and shark eggs are like too! The giant tank opposite the rock pools was one we’d seen earlier from lower down, but this time we could see the giant Sea Turtles too. They were massive.

Now the last thing I was expecting to see on the bank of the Thames was Penguins, so when we headed into the Polar area and came face to face with several Gentoo penguins we were quite excited.

The Penguins were happily waddling around in their icy enclosure, standing by the glass as if they were posing for photos before waddling away for a dip in their chilly waters. This was a brilliant addition and something different we haven’t seen at similar attractions before. And again, they had one of those pop-up domes inside for the kids to ‘get in’ the Penguin enclosure.

Conservation Cove is the area of the SeaLife London Aquarium dedicated to letting you know how SeaLife Centres aid with helping endangered sea life and what you can do to help.

The last stop on the tour was home to several kinds of Jelly fish. Tiny ones and large ones, Moon jellyfish, the Japanese Sea Nettle, all weird shapes with unusual colours and flowing tentacles. When I was a kid you only ever used to see them washed up on the beach, so it’s great to be able to see them close up and not get stung. The area was filled with florescent lighting, maps to show you were different jellyfish lived, and they even had a Jellyfish arcade game.

And we were done. Out through the gift shop to pick up a souvenir. Whilst they had magnets and t-shirts, they were generic ‘SeaLife Centre’ branded and nothing specific to London, aside from a mug, so we didn’t pick anything up. You can always get toys, plushes, and other items too.

We’d seen it recommended you’d need 1-1.5 hours to get through the SeaLife London Aquarium, and we’d given ourselves 90 minutes as we had Shrek’s Adventure booked next. We’d arrived a tad early, so had an extra 15 minutes and still felt like we were rushing at the end, so give yourselves 2 hours if its the first time you’ve been. If you’re the kind of visitor that likes to see everything, read all the info, watch the videos, then I’d say, yeah, 2 hours or more. Manchester can be done in 40 minutes, but this SeaLife Centre was a lot bigger with plenty to see and do.

Sharks, Sea Turtles, Rock Pools, VR Experiences, and even Penguins. The SeaLife London Aquarium felt like one of the better aquarium experiences we’d done and is definitely worth a visit.

Swim over to the Sea Life London Aquarium website for more info.