Museum sights in London
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Natural History Museum
This mammoth institution is dedicated to the Victorian pursuit of collecting and cataloguing. Walking into the Life galleries (Blue Zone) in the 1880 Gothic Revival building off Cromwell Rd evokes the musty moth-eaten era of the Victorian gentleman scientist. The main museum building, with its blue and sand-coloured brick and terracotta, was designed by Alfred Waterhouse and is as impressive as the towering diplodocus dinosaur skeleton in the Central Hall just ahead of the main entrance. It’s hard to match any of the exhibits with this initial sight, except perhaps the huge blue whale just beyond it. Children, who are the main fans of this museum, are primed for more…
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British Museum
The country's largest museum and one of the oldest and finest in the world, this famous museum boasts vast Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, European and Middle Eastern galleries, among many others.
Begun in 1753 with a 'cabinet of curiosities' bequeathed by Sir Hans Sloane to the nation on his death, the collection mushroomed over the ensuing years partly through plundering the empire. The grand Enlightenment Gallery was the first section of the redesigned museum to be built (in 1820).
Among the must-sees are the Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, discovered in 1799; the controversial Parthenon Sculptures, stripped from the walls of the…
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Churchill Museum & Cabinet War Rooms
Down in the bunker where Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his cabinet and generals met during WWII, £6 million has been spent on a huge exhibition devoted to ‘the greatest Briton’. This whizz-bang multimedia Churchill Museum joins the highly evocative Cabinet War Rooms, where chiefs of staff slept, ate and plotted Hitler’s downfall, blissfully believing they were protected from Luftwaffe bombs by the 3m slab of concrete overhead. (Turns out it would have crumpled like paper had the area taken a hit.) Together, these two sections make you forget the Churchill who was a maverick and lousy peacetime politician, and drive home how much the cigar-chewing, wartime PM was a…
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Science Museum
With seven floors of interactive and educational exhibits, this spellbinding museum will mesmerise young and old.
The Energy Hall, on the ground floor, displays machines of the Industrial Revolution, including Stephenson's innovative rocket (1829). Nostalgic parents will delight in the Apollo 10 command module in the Making the Modern World gallery.
An intriguing detour on the 1st floor is Listening Post, a haunting immersion into the 'sound' and chatter of the internet interspersed with thoughtful silence.
The History of Computing on the 2nd floor displays some intriguing devices, from Charles Babbage's ana-lytical engine to hulking valve-based computers.
The 3rd-floor…
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Sir John Soane's Museum
This little museum is one of the most atmospheric and fascinating sights in London. The building is the beautiful, bewitching home of architect Sir John Soane (1753–1837), which he left brimming with surprising personal effects and curiosities, and the museum represents his exquisite and eccentric taste.
Soane was a country bricklayer’s son, most famous for designing the Bank of England. In his work and life, he drew on ideas picked up while on an 18th-century grand tour of Italy. He married a rich woman and used the wealth to build this house and the one next door, which was opened as an exhibition and education space in late 2007. The heritage-listed house is largely…
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Wellcome Collection
Focussing on the interface of art, science and medicine, this clever museum is surprisingly fascinating. There are interactive displays where you can scan your face and watch it stretched into the statistical average; wacky modern sculptures inspired by various medical conditions; and downright creepy things, like an actual cross-section of a body and enlargements of parasites (fleas, body lice, scabies) at terrifying proportions.
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Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret
This unique museum, 32 steps up the spiral stairway through the poorly marked door on the left leading into the tower of St Thomas Church (1703), focuses on the nastiness of 19th-century hospital treatment. Rediscovered in 1956 the garret was used by the apothecary of St Thomas’s Hospital to store medicinal herbs and now houses a medical museum. Browse the natural remedies, including snail water for venereal disease and bladderwrack for goitre and tuberculosis. A fiendish array of amputation knives and blades is a presage to the 19th-century operating theatres and their rough-and-ready (pre-ether, pre-chloroform, pre-antiseptic) conditions. Surgeons had to be snappy; one…
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Geffrye Museum
This series of beautiful 18th-century ivy-clad almshouses, with an extensive and well-presented herb garden, was first opened as a museum in 1914, in a spot that was then in the centre of the furniture industry. The museum inside is devoted to domestic interiors, with each room of the main building furnished to show how the homes of the relatively affluent middle class would have looked from Elizabethan times right through to the end of the 19th century. A postmodernist extension completed in 1998 contains several 20th-century rooms (a flat from the 1930s, a room in the contemporary style of the 1950s and a 1990s converted warehouse complete with IKEA furniture) as well…
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Hunterian Museum
The collection of anatomical specimens of pioneering surgeon John Hunter (1728–93) inspired this fascinating, slightly morbid, little-known, yet fantastic London museum. Among the more bizarre items on display are the skeleton of a 2.3m giant, half of mathematician Charles Babbage’s brain and, hilariously, Winston Churchill’s dentures.
Thanks to a massive refurbishment some years back, the atmosphere is less gory and allows decent viewing of such things as animal digestive systems (forensically documented in formaldehyde) and the ‘hearing organ’ of a blue whale. Upstairs there’s a display on surgery techniques, which will impress and disgust in equal measure.…
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National Maritime Museum
Narrating the long and eventful history of seafaring Britain, this museum is one of Greenwich's top attractions. Museum space increased with the Sammy Ofer Wing, which opened in late 2011.
The exhibits are arranged thematically and highlights include Miss Britain III (the first boat to top 100mph on open water) from 1933, the 19m-long golden state barge built in 1732 for Frederick, Prince of Wales, and the huge ship's propeller installed on level 1. The museum also owns the uniform coat that Britain's greatest seafaring hero, Horatio Nelson, was wearing when he was fatally shot (and the actual bullet), plus a replica of the lifeboat used by explorer Ernest Shackleton and…
reviewed
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Victoria & Albert Museum
The V & A has the finest collection of decorative art and design ever assembled and galleries are being redeveloped and reinvented all the time. Visitors are particularly drawn to the fashion displays and the Islamic and Asian galleries with their carpets, ceramics, and ornate arms and armour.
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Dr Johnson’s House
This wonderful house, built in 1700, is a rare surviving example of a Georgian city mansion. All around it today huge office blocks loom and tiny Gough Square can be quite hard to find. The house has been preserved, as it was the home of the great Georgian wit Samuel Johnson, the author of the first serious dictionary of the English language and the man who proclaimed ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’.
The museum doesn’t exactly crackle with Dr Johnson’s immortal wit, yet it’s still an atmospheric and worthy place to visit, with its antique furniture and artefacts from Johnson’s life. The numerous paintings of Dr Johnson and his associates, including…
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Bank of England Museum
When William III declared war against France in the 17th century, he looked over his shoulder and soon realised he didn’t have the funds to finance his armed forces. A Scottish merchant by the name of William Paterson came up with the idea of forming a joint-stock bank that could lend the government money and, in 1694, so began the Bank of England and the notion of national debt. The bank rapidly expanded in size and stature and moved to this site in 1734. During a financial crisis at the end of the 18th century, a cartoon appeared depicting the bank as a haggard old woman, and this is probably the origin of its nickname ‘the Old Lady of Threadneedle St’. The institution…
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Imperial War Museum
Fronted by a pair of intimidating 15in naval guns, this riveting museum is housed in what was once Bethlehem Royal Hospital, also known as Bedlam. Although the museum's focus is on military action involving British or Commonwealth troops during the 20th century, it rolls out the carpet to war in the wider sense. There's not just Lawrence of Arabia's 1000cc motorbike, but a German V-2 rocket, a Sherman tank and a lifelike replica of Little Boy (the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima).
In the Trench Experience on the lower ground floor you walk through the grim reality of life on the Somme front line in WWI; the Blitz Experience has you cowering inside a mock bomb shelter…
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Museum of London
One of the capital's best museums, this is a fascinating walk through the various incarnations of the city from An-glo-Saxon village to 21st-century metropolis. The first gallery, London Before London, brings to life the ancient settlements that predated the capital and is followed by the Roman era, full of interesting displays and models. The rest of the floor takes you through the Saxon, medieval, Tudor and Stuart periods, culminating in the Great Fire of 1666. From here head down to the modern galleries, opened in 2010, where, in Expanding City, you'll find exquisite fashion and jewellery, the graffitied walls of a prison cell (1750) and the Rhinebeck Panorama, a…
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Horniman Museum
This museum is an extraordinary place, comprising the original collection of wealthy tea merchant Frederick John Horniman, a pack rat who had the art nouveau building with clock tower and mosaics specially designed to house it in 1901. Today it encompasses everything from a dusty stuffed walrus and voodoo altars from Haiti and Benin to a mock-up of a Fijian reef and a collection of concertinas. It’s wonderful. On the ground and 1st floors is the Natural History Gallery, the core of the Horniman collection, with usual animal skeletons and pickled specimens. On the lower ground floor you’ll find the African Worlds Gallery, the first permanent gallery of African and…
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Museum in Docklands
Housed in a converted 200-year-old warehouse once used to store sugar, rum and coffee, this museum offers a comprehensive overview of the entire history of the Thames from the arrival of the Romans in AD 43. But it’s at its best when dealing with specifics close by such as the controversial transformation of the decrepit docks into Docklands in the 1980s. The tour begins on the 3rd floor (take the lift to the top) with the Roman settlement of Londinium – don’t miss the delightful Roman blue-glass bowl discovered in pieces at a building site in Prescot St E1 in 2008 – and works its way downwards through the ages. Keep an eye open for the scale mode of the old London Bridge…
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Dennis Severs' House
This extraordinary Georgian House is set up as if its occupants had just walked out the door. There are half-drunk cups of tea, lit candles and, in a perhaps unnecessary attention to detail, a full chamber pot by the bed. More than a museum, it's an opportunity to meditate on the minutiae of everyday Georgian life through silent exploration.
Bookings are required for the Monday evening candlelit sessions (£12; 6pm to 9pm), but you can just show up on the first and third Sundays of the month (£8; noon to 4pm) or the following Mondays (£5; noon to 2pm).
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Fulham Palace
Summer home of the bishops of London from 704 to 1973, Fulham Palace is an interesting mix of architectural styles set in beautiful gardens and, until 1924, when filled with rubble, enclosed by the longest moat in England. The oldest part to survive is the little red-brick Tudor gateway, but the main building you see today is from the mid-17th century and was remodelled in the 19th century. There’s a pretty walled garden and, detached from the main house, a Tudor Revival chapel designed by Butterfield in 1866. You can learn about the history of the palace and its inhabitants in the museum. Guided tours, which depart a couple of times a month on Sunday, usually take in…
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Britain at War Experience
You can pop down to the London Underground air-raid shelter, look at gas masks and ration books, stroll around Southwark during the Blitz and learn about the battle on the home front. It's crammed with fascinating WWII memorabilia.
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Wellington Arch
This magnificent neoclassical 1826 arch, facing Apsley House in the green space strangled by the Hyde Park Corner roundabout, originally faced the Hyde Park Screen, but was shunted here in 1882 for road widening. The same year saw the removal of the disproportionately large equestrian statue of the duke crowning it, making way some years later for Europe’s largest bronze sculpture: Peace Descending on the Quadriga of War (1912), three years in the casting.
Until the 1960s part of the monument served as a tiny police station (complete with pet moggy), but was restored and opened up to the public as a three-floor exhibition space, with exhibits on the blue plaque scheme …
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Handel House Museum
George Frederick Handel lived in this 18th-century Mayfair building for 36 years until his death in 1759; this is where he composed some of his finest works, including Water Music, Messiah, Zadok the Priest and Fireworks Music. The house opened as a museum in late 2001 after extensive restorations and looks as it would have when the great German-born composer was in residence.
Exhibits include early editions of Handel’s operas and oratorios, portraits of musicians and singers who worked with Handel and musical instruments in the Rehearsal & Performance room on the first floor; musicians regularly come to practice so you may be treated to a free concert. The staff attending…
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Hackney Museum
This small museum tracing the history of one of the most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods in the country is particularly stylish, with display boards featuring translucent squares of the same colour and one case showing single mementoes and effects from diverse ethnic communities – Jews, Chinese, Indians etc – behind square panes of glass. Even the 1000-year-old Saxon log boat, discovered on the marshes of Springfield Park in 1987, has been placed in the floor under glass squares. Yet the design is not so flashy as to interfere with what’s on show, from zoetropes and an early-20th-century (and very confusing) locality map to a pie ‘n’ mash shop and a dream kitchen of the…
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Museum of Garden History
In a city that offers the broad attractions of Kew Gardens, the modest Museum of Garden History housed in the church of St Mary-at-Lambeth is mainly for the seriously green-thumbed. Its trump card is the charming knot garden, a replica of a 17th-century formal garden, with topiary hedges clipped into an intricate, twirling design. Keen gardeners will enjoy the displays on the 17th-century Tradescant père and fils – a father-and-son team who were gardeners to Charles I and Charles II, globetrotters and enthusiastic collectors of exotic plants (they introduced the pineapple to London). Nongardeners might like to pay their respects to Captain William Bligh (of mutinous …
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Florence Nightingale Museum
Attached to St Thomas’s Hospital, this small, recently refurbished museum tells the story of feisty war heroine Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), who led a team of nurses to Turkey in 1854 during the Crimean War. There she worked to improve conditions for the soldiers before returning to London to set up a training school for nurses at St Thomas’s in 1859. So popular did she become that baseball-card-style photos of the gentle ‘Lady of the Lamp’ were sold during her lifetime. There is no shortage of revisionist detractors who dismiss her as a ‘canny administrator’ and ‘publicity hound’; Nightingale was, in fact, one of the world’s first modern celebrities. But the fact…
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