News Year 7’s Immersive Pompeii Experience at Excel London 26.02.2026
On Tuesday morning our Year 7s arrived at school full of excited anticipation as they prepared for first whole year-group trip. They started the day in school with the whole Classics Department taking part in a talk and discussion led by Mrs Grace on the different ways of ‘Witnessing History’. The students engaged thoughtfully in considering perspectives and types of evidence, using these ideas to examine extracts from Pliny’s eye-witness accounts of the eruption of Vesuvius.
They then hopped on the tube to ExCel London to visit ‘The Last Days of Pompeii: The Immersive Exhibition’. The content of the exhibition marries perfectly with the cultural study of Pompeii which runs in parallel to the linguistic content of the Cambridge Latin Course. Alongside some more traditional artefacts, they viewed replica body casts of some of those who died in the eruption and learned about the method used to make these. The real excitement came with the VR experiences: the girls watched a gladiator fight with a tiger at close quarters in the arena of the amphitheatre, then lost themselves in a 360 projected show taking them through the story of the eruption from the initial earthquake right up until the town’s rediscovery in the 16th century. The final virtual reality was perhaps the most immersive: a chance to walk around the famous Villa of Mysteries ‘in real life’, taking in the decoration as it would have been before August AD 79.
They lunched on the waterfront, enjoying some very welcome sunshine, before heading back to school for a ‘picture round’ quiz on classical sites, sayings, and stories.