Most museums that feature old technology put it behind glass. Re:Wired, which opened earlier this month in Middlesbrough, takes the opposite approach. The consoles are out. The arcade machines are running. You are expected to play them.
Re:Wired Museum & Arcade is a community interest company founded by Rob Lynas, based at Medhurst House on Southerby Road. It operates on a pay-what-you-can model — all income goes back into the museum — and its stated mission is twofold: preserve retro technology that would otherwise end up in landfill, and use it to inspire the next generation of engineers, designers, and digital creators.
The origin story is a familiar one to anyone who has introduced a child to old hardware. Lynas bought a Game Boy, watched his young son pick it up and become immediately absorbed in Tetris and Super Mario Bros, and noticed how quickly the boy shared it with his friends. The curiosity it sparked — not just about the game, but about how the thing worked — is what Re:Wired is built around.
What’s There
The museum covers classic consoles and home computers through to interactive exhibits on how technology has evolved. The collection spans Game Boys, Atari 2600, and everything in between — rescued, restored, and catalogued by the Re:Wired team. The emphasis on hands-on access is the thing that separates it from a standard collection; every piece of tech, in Lynas’s words, has a story and is worth saving, but it’s more useful in someone’s hands than on a shelf.
Re:Wired is currently working towards a first permanent exhibition space while running pop-up events, workshops, and community outreach programmes. They’re actively seeking volunteers and donations of vintage technology — if you have old hardware sitting in a loft that you’d rather see used than binned, they want to hear from you.
Why This Matters
The retro gaming community does a lot of its preservation work online — emulation, ROM archives, digital documentation. That work is valuable and ongoing. But there’s something that only physical spaces can do, which is put the hardware in front of people who have never seen it and let them figure out for themselves why it mattered.
A teenager who has grown up on a PS5 touching an original Game Boy for the first time and understanding — immediately, intuitively — why it worked, is having a different experience to reading about it. Re:Wired is building a space for that experience in the North East, on a model that doesn’t exclude anyone who can’t afford an entry fee.
The Vintage Computer Festival GB 2026 is running in Leigh, Lancashire from 19-21 June. Re:Wired in Middlesbrough is the complement to that — a permanent, accessible, community-rooted version of the same impulse. Between the two, the North of England is quietly becoming one of the better places in the country to engage with computing and gaming history in person.
Re:Wired Museum & Arcade is at Medhurst House, Southerby Road, Middlesbrough. Pay what you can. For more information and to find out about volunteering or donating hardware, contact the team directly. For more on retro gaming events, see our piece on the Vintage Computer Festival GB 2026.