Among the first London museums to engage with the city's rarely mentioned links to slavery, the London Museum Docklands has an entire gallery called London, Sugar & Slavery, where one of the most haunting images is a diagram showing how enslaved inhabitants were chained inside the transatlantic slave ship, Brookes. The museum also has pioneering exhibits on women in London and the capital’s black community, including one on the Windrush arrivals and their legacy.
Aptly set in an early-19th-century dockside warehouse, the museum combines artifacts with clever multimedia displays to map the city's history through its river and docks. Most people start on the 3rd floor, in the No 1 Warehouse section, before making their way down through the centuries. The Trade Expansion gallery includes a reconstructed late-18th-century Legal Quay and an iron gibbet that once gorily displayed the bodies of executed pirates.
The 2nd floor includes a recreation of a 19th-century dock, complete with cobbled streets, bars and lodging houses in Sailortown. There's also a great section discussing the docks during the World Wars and their controversial transformation into London's second financial district during the 1980s.
