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Penzance is unusually good at bad weather. Everything worth doing sits within a few minutes’ walk of everything else, so a wet day here means short dashes between indoor places rather than a day written off. Staying further out? Our rainy day guide to West Cornwall covers the wider area.
Jubilee Pool
An art deco seawater lido on the seafront with a geothermally heated section. Swimming outdoors in the rain sounds like a punishment and is in fact one of the better things you can do here, because the water is warm and the weather stops mattering.
Penlee House Gallery and Museum
The town gallery, strong on the Newlyn School painters who worked along this coast. Small, well curated, and it gives you the context for a lot of what you will see elsewhere in West Cornwall. An hour, comfortably.
Chapel Street
The old street running up from the harbour, lined with independent shops, and home to the Egyptian House, which is precisely as odd as its name suggests. You can work your way up it in short indoor hops.
An escape room
We should declare the interest: this is us. Escape Rooms Cornwall is at 44 New Street, in the basement of the Old Telephone Exchange, a few minutes from the seafront.
It earns its place on an indoor list for a specific reason: it is the option that works for a mixed group. Teenagers, grandparents and children all contribute to the same puzzles, which is not true of a gallery or a swim. For an hour, nobody is looking at a phone and nobody is bored.
- Four rooms, including 28 Pasties Later at a full 90 minutes and The Lamorna Brown Affair with no scares at all
- 2 to 8 players per room, up to 23 across the rooms at once
- From £60 per room — about £20pp for a full room; under-7s free
- Open 10am to 10pm, seven days a week
- Well-behaved dogs welcome — useful when the rain has cancelled the walk
- Always a private game; you are never put in with strangers
Worth knowing before you come: the rooms are down a flight of stairs, one puzzle asks you to bend low, and there are no toilets in the rooms themselves. Ring 01736 691049 if any of that needs talking through.
Eat, properly
Penzance and Newlyn have enough good food that a long lunch counts as a plan. On a wet day it is often the best two hours of it.
Putting a wet day together
The trick is blocks rather than one big activity. A workable Penzance day under cover:
- Morning: Penlee House, then up Chapel Street
- Middle: a long lunch in town
- Afternoon: an escape room slot, or the Jubilee Pool if the heated section is open
- Evening: we run until 10pm, so the room can just as easily be the after-dinner plan
Book the indoor thing early
Indoor options across Cornwall fill fastest on wet days, because everybody books them at nine o’clock while looking out of the window. If the forecast is poor midweek, book ahead.
Check availability, see prices, or find us with directions and parking.
