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Natural History Museum
A mammoth institution dedicated to the Victorian pursuit of collecting and cataloguing. Walking into the Life Galleries, 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 entrance hall.
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New London Architecture
An excellent way to see which way London's architectural development is going, this is a frequently changing exhibition that will capture the imagination and interest of anyone who loves London. A large model of the capital highlights the new building areas, shows the extent of the 2012 Olympics plans and various neighbourhood regeneration programmes.
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Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret
This unique museum, at the top of the narrow and rickety 32-step tower of St Thomas Church (1703), focuses on the nastiness of 19th-century hospital treatment. The garret was used by the apothecary of St Thomas's Hospital to store medicinal herbs and now houses an atmospheric medical museum delightfully hung with bunches of herbs that soften the impact of the horrible devices displayed in the glass cases.
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Old Royal Naval College
There are two main rooms open to the public at the college - the Painted Hall and the chapel - which are accessed through the new visitor centre and adjoining Greenwich Tourist Information Centre in the Pepys Building. When Christopher Wren was commissioned to build a naval hospital here in 1692, he designed it in two separate halves so as not to spoil the view of the river from the Queen's House, Inigo Jones' miniature masterpiece to the south.
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Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology
If you've got any interest in things Egyptian, you'll love this quiet and oft-overlooked museum, where some 80,000 objects make up one of the most impressive collections of Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology in the world. Behind glass - and amid an atmosphere of academia - are exhibits ranging from fragments of pottery to the world's oldest dress (2800 BC).
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Photographers' Gallery
This tiny two-part gallery may be small in size, but it's certainly got a big reputation in the photography world. It won't even be that small come 2008, since plans are underway to relocate to 16-18 Ramillies St in Soho with the new premises designed by O'Donnell + Tuomey Architects.
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Pollock's Toy Museum
Simultaneously creepy and mesmerising, this museum is aimed at both kids and adults. You walk in through the museum shop laden with excellent wooden toys and various games, and start your exploration by climbing up a rickety narrow staircase...
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Queen's Gallery
Paintings, sculpture, ceramics, furniture and jewellery are among the items displayed in the collection of art amassed by the royals over 500 years. The splendid gallery was originally designed by John Nash as a conservatory. It was converted into a chapel for Victoria in 1843, destroyed in a 1940 air raid and reopened as a gallery in 1962.
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Queen's House
This building was first called the 'House of Delight' and that's certainly still true. The first Palladian building by architect Inigo Jones after he returned from Italy, it's far more enticing than the art collection in it, even though that contains some Turners, Holbeins, Hogarths and Gainsboroughs.
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Ragged School Museum
Both adults and children are inevitably charmed by the Ragged School Museum, a combination of mock Victorian schoolroom - with hard wooden benches and desks, slates, chalk, inkwells and abacuses - on the 1st floor, and social history museum below. 'Ragged' was a Victorian term used to refer to pupils' usually torn, dirty and dishevelled clothes.
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Ranger's House
This elegant Georgian villa in the southwest corner of Greenwich Park was built in 1723 and once housed the park's ranger. It now contains a collection of 650 works of art (medieval and Renaissance paintings, porcelain, silverware, tapestries etc) amassed by one Julius Wernher, a German-born railway engineer's son who struck it rich in the diamond fields of South Africa in the 19th century.
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Royal Academy of Arts
Britain's first art school was founded in 1768, though it only moved here in the following century. It's a great place to come for some free art, thanks to the John Madejski's Fine Rooms, where drawings ranging from Constable, Reynolds, Gainsborough and Turner to Hockney are displayed for nowt.
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Royal Geographical Society
A short distance to the east of the Royal Albert Hall is the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society, housed in a Queen Anne-style redbrick edifice (1874) easily identified by the statues of explorers David Livingstone and Ernest Shackleton outside. The entrance to the society is on Exhibition Rd.
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Royal Observatory
In 1675 Charles II had the Royal Observatory built on a hill in the middle of the Greenwich Park, intending that astronomy be used to establish longitude at sea. The Octagon Room, designed by Wren, and the nearby Sextant Room are where John Flamsteed (1646-1719), the first astronomer royal, made his observations and calculations.
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Science Museum
This is one of the most progressive and accessible museums of its kind, and does a terrific job of bringing to lustrous life a subject that is often dull, dense and impenetrable for kids and adults alike. With five floors of interactive and educational exhibits, it's informative and entertaining and has something to snag the interest of every age group.
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Serpentine Gallery
The Serpentine Gallery may be a gentle-looking 1930s tea pavilion in the midst of the leafy Kensington Gardens, but it's one of London's edgiest contemporary art galleries. Artists including Damien Hirst, Andreas Gursky, Louise Bourgeois, Gabriel Orozco and Tomoko Takahashi have all exhibited here, and the gallery's huge windows beam natural light onto the pieces, making the space perfect for sculpture and interactive displays.
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Sherlock Holmes Museum
Fans of the books will enjoy examining the three floors of reconstructed Victoriana, deerstalkers, burning candles, flickering grates, but may balk at the dodgy waxworks of Professor Moriarty and 'the Man with the Twisted Lip'. The only disappointment is the lack of material and information on Arthur Conan Doyle.
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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 effects and curiosities, and the museum represents his exquisite and eccentric taste.
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Somerset House
Passing beneath the arch towards this splendid Palladian masterpiece, it's hard to believe that the magnificent courtyard in front of you, with its 55 dancing fountains, was a car park for tax collectors up until a spectacular refurbishment in 2000. William Chambers designed the house in 1775 for royal societies and it now contains three fabulous museums.
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Somerset House Museums
Somerset Houses contains three museums, of which the Courtauld Institute of Art (www.courtauld.ac.uk) is the best. Although it has several old masters, its speciality is impressionism and post-impressionism, with works by Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Monet, Matisse, Renoir and Van Gogh. The Hermitage Rooms (www.hermitagerooms.com) are an outpost of St Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum and are only as good as their current exhibition.
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Sutton House
It's difficult to imagine well-heeled Tudor noblemen such as Thomas Sutton, founder of the Charterhouse almshouse, living in 'ackney, but as East London's oldest surviving house proves, they did, and in some style too. Abandoned and taken over by squatters in the 1980s (who have left behind a large mural of an eye in the attic), it's since been put under the care of the National Trust and magnificently restored.
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Tate Britain
You'd think that Tate Britain may have suffered since its lavish, sexy sibling, Tate Modern, took half its collection and all of the limelight up river when it opened in 2000, but on the contrary, things have worked out perfectly for both galleries. The venerable Tate Britain, built in 1897, stretched out splendidly into the increased space with its definitive collection of British art from the 16th to the late 20th centuries.
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Tate Modern
The public's love affair with this phenomenally successful modern art gallery shows no sign of waning. Serious art critics have occasionally swiped at its populism (eg Carl Höller's funfair-like slides, Olafur Eliasson's participatory The Weather Project , both in the vast Turbine Hall) and poked holes in its collection. But 5 million visitors make it the world's most popular contemporary art gallery, and London's most visited sight.
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The Garden Museum
In a city holding out 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.
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V&A Museum Of Childhood
Housed in a renovated Victorian-era building which has won a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) award for outstanding design, this museum is aimed at both kids - with its activity rooms and corners of child-friendly, interactive exhibits, games and toys - and nostalgia-seeking grown-ups who come to admire the antique doll houses, model trains, teddy bears and other toys arranged thematically.
