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 pr…
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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 the plundering of the empire. The grand Enlightenment Gallery was the first section of the redesigned museum to be built (in 1823).
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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Science Museum
With seven floors of interactive and educational exhibits, the Science Museum covers everything from the Industrial Revolution to the exploration of space. There is something for all ages, from vintage cars, trains and aeroplanes to labour-saving devices for the home, a wind tunnel and flight simulator. Kids love the interactive sections. There's also a 450-seat Imax cinema.
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Sir John Soane's Museum
Not all of this area's inhabitants were poor, as is aptly demonstrated by the remarkable home of celebrated architect and collector extraordinaire Sir John Soane (1753–1837). Now a fascinating museum, the house has been left largely as it was when Sir John was taken out in a box. Among his eclectic acquisitions are an Egyptian sarcophagus, dozens of Greek and Roman antiquities and the original Rake's Progress, William Hogarth's set of caricatures telling the story of a late 18th-century London cad. Soane was clearly a very clever chap – check out the ingenious folding walls in the picture gallery. Tours (£5) are given at 11am on Saturdays.
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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 cas…
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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
One of London's most genuinely gruesome attractions, the Old Operating Theatre Museum is Britain's only surviving 19th-century operating theatre, rediscovered in 1956 within the garret of a church. The display of primitive surgical tools is suitably terrifying, while the pickled bits of humans are just unpleasant.
It's a hands-on kind of place, with signs saying 'please touch', although obviously the pointy things are locked away. For a more intense experience, check the website for the regular 20-minute 'special events'.
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Geffrye Museum
If you like nosing around other people's homes, the Geffrye Museum will be a positively orgasmic experience. Devoted to middle-class domestic interiors, these former almshouses (1714) have been converted into a series of living rooms dating from 1630 to the current Ikea generation. On top of the interiors porn, the back garden has been transformed into period garden 'rooms' and a lovely walled herb garden (April to October only).
The museum is three blocks along Kingsland Rd, the continuation of Shoreditch High St.
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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 things such as animal digestive systems, forensically documented in formaldehyde, and wonders such as the ‘hearing organ’ of a blue whale. Upstairs includes a display on plastic surgery techniques, which will impress and disgust in eq…
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National Maritime Museum Museum
Directly behind the old college, the National Maritime Museum completes Greenwich's trump hand of historic buildings. The museum itself houses a large collection of paraphernalia recounting Britain's seafaring history. Exhibits range from interactive displays to humdingers like Cook's journals and Nelson's uniform, complete with a hole from the bullet that killed him. The mood changes abruptly between galleries (one is devoted to toy ships while another examines the slave trade).
At the centre of the site, the elegant Palladian Queen's House has been restored to something like Inigo Jones' intention when he designed it in 1616 for the wife of Charles I. It's a refined sett…
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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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Guildhall Art Gallery & Roman London Amphitheatre
The gallery of the City of London provides a fascinating look at the politics of the Square Mile over the past few centuries, with a great collection of paintings of London in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as the vast frieze entitled The Defeat of the Floating Batteries (1791), depicting the British victory at the Siege of Gibraltar in 1782. This huge painting was removed to safety just a month before the gallery was hit by a German bomb in 1941 – it spent 50 years rolled up before a spectacular restoration in 1999. An even more recent arrival is a sculpture of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, which has to be housed in a protective glass case as the iron la…
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Dr Johnson's House
The Georgian house where Samuel Johnson and his assistants compiled the first English dictionary (between 1748 and 1759) is full of prints and portraits of friends and intimates, including the good doctor's Jamaican servant to whom he bequeathed this grand residence.
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Bank of England Museum
Guardian of the country's financial system, the Bank of England was established in 1694 when the government needed to raise cash to support a war with France. It was moved here in 1734 and largely renovated by Sir John Soane. The surprisingly interesting museum traces the history of the bank and banking system. Audioguides are free and you even get to pick up a £230,000 gold bar.
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Imperial War Museum
You don't have to be a lad to appreciate the Imperial War Museum and its spectacular atrium with Spitfires hanging from the ceiling, rockets (including the massive German V2), field guns, missiles, submarines, tanks, torpedoes and other military hardware. Providing a telling lesson in modern history, highlights include a recreated WWI trench and WWII bomb shelter as well as a Holocaust exhibition.
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Museum of London
Visiting the fascinating Museum of London early in your stay helps to make sense of the layers of history that make up this place. The Roman section, in particular, illustrates how the modern is grafted onto the ancient; several of the city's main thoroughfares were once Roman roads, for instance.
The museum's £20 million Galleries of Modern London opened in 2010, encompassing everything from 1666 (the Great Fire) to the present day. While the Lord Mayor's ceremonial coach is the centrepiece, an effort has been made to create an immersive experience: you can enter reconstructions of an 18th-century debtors' prison, a Georgian pleasure garden and a Victorian street.
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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 Afro-Car…
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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 t…
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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
Opposite Apsley House in the little bit of green space being strangled by the Hyde Park Corner roundabout is England’s answer to the Arc de Triomphe (except this one commemorates France’s defeat – specifically, Napoleon’s at the hands of the Duke of Wellington). The neoclassical arch, erected in 1826, used to be topped by a disproportionately large equestrian statue of the duke, but this was removed in 1883 and replaced some years later with the biggest bronze sculpture in Britain, Peace Descending on the Quadriga of War (1912). For years part of the monument served as the capital’s smallest police station, but was restored and opened up to the public as a three-f…
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Handel House Museum
George Frideric Handel's pad from 1723 until his death in 1759 is now a moderately interesting museum dedicated to his life. He wrote some of his greatest works here, including the Messiah, and music still fills the house during live recitals (see the website for details).
From songs of praise to Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix lived next door at number 23 many years (and genres) later.
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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 Bo…
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