This paper reports new experimental and numerical results on miscible displacements in saturated, homogeneous five-spot bead-packed flow models. A series of experimental floods at a range of mobility ratios is presented which generates new data for unstable displacement processes. These data are presented up to 100% recovery and they include the following: the effluent concentrations and recovery profiles, in situ visualisation of the flow patterns and measurement of the pressure field. A comparable cycle of floods at mobility ratios of approximately M = 4,11 and 25 in a repacked five-spot system showed excellent reporducibility between tests. The volumetric displacement efficiencies compare very well with the published experimental data where this is available. The measurement of the pressure field is particularly novel and this information can be utilised in order to assess averaged (upscaled) models of viscous instability.A high-accuracy numerical method with third-order differencing for convection and second-order temporal differencing is proposed which is equivalent to an 11-point interpolation. The simulator treats the full velocity-dependent anisotropic diffusion/dispersion tensor and is validated by comparing numerical results with the analytical solution for incompressible radial flow. The numerical method has been used to simulate the experimental five-spot stable and unstable displacements. The simulation reproduces the experimental effluent concentrations, recovery performances and pressure drops very well and also matches the main features of the experimental finger evolution.The central novel contributions of this paper are that (i) a complete qualitative experimental data set, including novel pressure field measurements, has been obtained up to 100% recovery which can be used to validate theoretical models of viscous fingering in five-spot (almost) homogeneous systems; and (ii) a numerical scheme is presented which is capable of accurately simulating the flows characterised by instability and low levels of physical dispersion in this ‘difficult’ geometry.