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National Gallery
With more than 2000 Western European paintings on display, the National Gallery is one of the largest galleries in the world. But it's the quality of the works, and not the quantity, that impresses most. Almost five million people visit each year, keen to see seminal paintings from every important epoch in the history of art.
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National Maritime Museum
Though it hardly sounds like a crowd-pleaser, this museum designed to tell the long and convoluted history of Britain as a seafaring nation is the most impressive sight in Greenwich. From the moment you step through the entrance to this magnificent neoclassical building you'll be won over. And it just gets better as you progress through the glass-roofed Neptune Court into the rest of this three-storey building.
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National Portrait Gallery
Excellent for putting faces to names over the last five centuries of British history, the gallery houses a primary collection of some 10,000 works, which are regularly rotated, among them the museum's first acquisition, the famous 'Chandos' portrait of Shakespeare.
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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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No 10 Downing St
When it comes to property it's all 'location, location, location' and it's certain that British prime ministers have it pretty good postcode-wise. Number 10 has been the official office of British leaders since 1732, when George II presented No 10 to Robert Walpole, and since refurbishment in 1902 it's also been the PM's official London residence. As Margaret Thatcher, a grocer's daughter, famously put it, the PM 'lives above the shop' here.
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No 2 Willow Rd
Fans of modern architecture will want to swing past this property, the central house in a block of three, designed by the 'structural rationalist' Ernö Goldfinger in 1939 as his family home. The interior, with its cleverly designed storage space and collection of artworks by Henry Moore, Max Ernst and Bridget Riley, is certainly interesting and accessible to all.
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O2 (Millennium Dome)
Since it closed at the end of 2000, having failed miserably in its bid to attract 12 million visitors, the huge circus tent-shaped O2 (renamed from the Millennium Dome in 2005) was, until recently for the most part unemployed. It has now hosted Bon Jovi and Barbara Streisand concerts and a massive exhibition called Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs.
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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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Piccadilly Circus
Together with Big Ben and Trafalgar Sq, this is postcard London. And despite the stifling crowds and racing midday traffic, the flashing ads and buzzing liveliness of Piccadilly Circus always make it exciting to be in London. The circus looks its best at night, when the flashing advertisement panels really shine against the dark sky.
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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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Princess Diana Memorial Fountain
The drama surrounding this memorial seems a predictably fraught postscript to a life that itself often hovered between the Sun's headlines, Greek tragedy and farce. Envisaged as a 'moat without a castle' (reflecting the Princess's supposed spiritual state?) draped 'like a necklace' (her elegance?) around Hyde Park near the Serpentine Bridge, this circular double stream had to be shut just a fortnight after it opened in 2004.
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Queen's Chapel
The royal sights generally don't leave people breathless, but this one may touch your heartstrings: it's where all the contemporary royals from Princess Diana to the Queen Mother have lain in their coffins in the run-up to their funerals. The church was originally built by Inigo Jones in the Palladian style and was the first post-Reformation church in England built for Roman Catholic worship.
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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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Red House
From the outside, this redbrick house built by Victorian designer William Morris in 1860 conjures up a gingerbread house in stone. The nine rooms open to the public bear all the elements of the 'Arts and Crafts' style to which Morris adhered - a bit of Gothic art here, some religious symbolism there.
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Regent's Park
The most elaborate and ordered of London's many parks, Regent's was created around 1820 by John Nash, who planned to use it as an estate upon which he could build palaces for the aristocracy. Although the plan never quite came off - like so many at the time - you can get some idea of what Nash might have achieved from the buildings along the Outer Circle, and in particular from the stuccoed Palladian mansions he built on Cumberland Tce.
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Richmond Park
At just over 1000 hectares (the largest urban parkland in Europe), Richmond Park offers everything from formal gardens and ancient oaks to unsurpassed views of central London 12 miles away. It's easy enough to escape the several roads that cut up the rambling wilderness, making the park an excellent spot for a quiet walk or picnic, even in summer when Richmond's riverside can be heaving.
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Rose Theatre
The Rose, for which Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson wrote their greatest plays and in which Shakespeare learned his craft, is unique in that its original 16th-century foundations have been unearthed. They were discovered in 1989 beneath an office building at Southwark Bridge and given a protective concrete cover. Administered by the Globe Theatre, the Rose is open to the public only when matinees are being performed at the Globe Theatre.
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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.
