London Museums: Complete Guide to 208 Museums

Multiple

Tours from £29

#1

British Museum

One of the world's great public museums, the British Museum traces human curiosity across continents and millennia. Founded in 1753, its eight-million-object co...

Multiple

Tours from £59

#2

Tower of London

More fortress than museum, the Tower of London compresses a thousand years of power, fear and ceremony. William the Conqueror's White Tower (1078) anchored the ...

Wax

Tours from £89

#3

Madame Tussauds London

Madame Tussauds London is theatre you can touch: lifelike wax figures staged under studio lights, built for selfies and playful make-believe. The tradition date...

Art

Tours from £25

#4

Tate Modern

Tate Modern turns a riverside power station into a cathedral of contemporary ideas. Since 2000 its Turbine Hall-152 metres long and 35 metres high-has hosted ar...

Science

#5

Science Museum

London's Science Museum turns curiosity into a hands-on journey, from steam power to spaceflight. Stand by thumping beam engines, study Babbage's Victorian "com...

Multiple

#6

Victoria and Albert Museum

The V&A is the world's great museum of art and design-a treasure-house of how people make things. Wander from the shimmering Jewellery Gallery to India's satiri...

Art

Tours from £19

#7

National Gallery

The National Gallery is Europe in a single walk: 700 years of painting, free to step into. Van Eyck's jewel-like Arnolfini dazzles with microscopic detail; Leon...

Religious

#8

St Paul's Cathedral

St Paul's is London's baroque heartbeat: Wren's great dome rising over a city rebuilt after fire and war. Inside, sunlight grazes mosaics and soaring arches; be...

Natural History

Tours from £91

#9

Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum is a cathedral to nature, housed in Alfred Waterhouse's terracotta dream. In Hintze Hall, a 25-metre blue whale called Hope sweeps ov...

Historic House

#10

Kensington Palace

Kensington Palace blends living residence with layered royal history. Walk the Stuart and Georgian State Apartments where ceremony shaped power, then step into ...

Military

#11

Imperial War Museum London

The Imperial War Museum tells modern conflict through people, choices and consequences-not hardware alone. Begin in the cavernous atrium under a Spitfire, Harri...

Historic House

#12

Hampton Court Palace

Hampton Court Palace is two palaces in one: Tudor drama and Baroque showpiece, joined beside the Thames. Explore Wolsey's and Henry VIII's vast kitchens and Gre...

Maritime

#13

Cutty Sark Museum

Cutty Sark is the last great tea clipper you can step aboard, launched in 1869 for speed. Walk her decks, then stand beneath the suspended, Muntz-metal hull to ...

Art

#14

Tate Britain

Tate Britain is the home of British art, from Tudor portraits to today's experimenters. Start with Turner's luminous seas in the Clore Gallery, then find Millai...

Horology

#15

Royal Observatory, Greenwich

At the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, time and place snap into focus. Stand astride the Prime Meridian, marked in 1851 and adopted worldwide in 1884, then meet H...

Biographical

#16

Sherlock Holmes Museum

The Sherlock Holmes Museum is a fan's delight: a Georgian townhouse dressed as 221B. Rooms brim with props from the stories-violin, chemical kit, Persian slippe...

Aviation

#17

Royal Air Force Museum London

The RAF Museum at Hendon puts a century of flight under one sky. Walk beneath Lancaster R5868 "S-Sugar", survivor of 137 sorties, then compare Spitfire grace wi...

Multiple

Tours from £73

#18

Churchill War Rooms

Beneath Whitehall, the Churchill War Rooms preserve a nerve centre built to outthink catastrophe. You step through low corridors into the Cabinet Room, where ni...

Art

Tours from £68

#19

National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery tells Britain's story person by person. Begin with Tudors-Holbein's world of power-and seek out NPG 1, the debated 'Chandos' Shake...

Maritime

#20

National Maritime Museum

The National Maritime Museum tells Britain's ocean story as a web of ventures, risks and reckonings. Nelson's Trafalgar coat, pierced and preserved, anchors the...

Maritime

#21

HMS Belfast

HMS Belfast is a floating city in steel, moored between memory and skyline. Nine decks unfold from bridge to boiler room, each space bright with instruments, ch...

Design

#22

Design Museum

A museum about everything you touch without noticing. The Design Museum maps the quiet decisions behind products, graphics, fashion and buildings, inside a rebo...

Transport

#23

London Transport Museum

This is London told through wheels, rails and diagrams. In Covent Garden's iron-and-glass halls, you climb through buses, tube carriages and driver cabs while t...

Art

#24

Wallace Collection

An 18th-century townhouse turned jewel box, the Wallace Collection delivers old-master intensity at domestic scale. Free to enter, it condenses France and the L...

Art

#25

Saatchi Gallery

A contemporary-art engine rather than a static collection, Saatchi Gallery turns fifteen airy white-cube rooms into a rolling conversation about now. Housed sin...

Multiple

#26

Horniman Museum and Gardens

South London's Horniman is a museum of connections: nature, music, people and place threaded through galleries and hillside gardens. Inside, the award-winning M...

Maritime

#27

Museum of London Docklands

Set in a Grade I-listed 1802 sugar warehouse, this museum anchors London's maritime memory. Galleries chart docks, trade and migration with uncommon clarity, ba...

Historic House

#28

Kenwood House

Kenwood pairs a serene heathland setting with interiors orchestrated by Robert Adam like music in plaster and light. The famed Library, all pale hues and delica...

Toy

#29

Young V&A

Reinvented with children and teens as co-designers, Young V&A fuses play, imagination and design into one learning engine. Play turns physics—balance, rhythm, w...

Philatelic

#30

Postal Museum

A compact, story-rich museum split across two buildings: the main galleries (design, routes, stamps, people) and the Mail Rail depot for the underground train r...

History

#31

Old Royal Naval College

A riverside stage set for British history: Tudor palace, charitable hospital, elite naval academy, and today one of Europe’s finest Baroque ensembles. Wren and ...

Art

#32

Sir John Soane's Museum

Three conjoined townhouses turned into a daylight laboratory by the Bank of England’s architect. Soane engineered shafts, mirrors and colored glass to ‘borrow’ ...

Interactive

#33

Twist Museum

Twist Museum is a compact, high-energy illusion space on Oxford Street that turns perception into play. You move through hands-on exhibits that mess with colour...

Art

#34

Queen's Gallery

A small, focused venue that rotates masterpieces from the Royal Collection—one of the world’s great working collections, held in trust for the nation. Shows are...

Interactive

Tours from £28

#35

Paradox Museum London

Paradox Museum London is built for people who want to laugh, take great photos, and feel their brain glitch in the best way. It is a self-guided route through m...

Historic House

#36

Eltham Palace

A time-jump in one visit: a late-medieval Great Hall rescued by a 1930s Art Deco dream house. Millionaire patrons Stephen and Virginia Courtauld hired Seely & P...

Art

#37

Barbican Centre

A concrete citadel for culture: the Barbican folds concert halls, theatres, galleries and a tropical conservatory into a raised ‘city within a city’ built on a ...

Historic House

#38

Osterley Park and House

A city-edge escape where Tudor bones wear a Robert Adam tuxedo. Osterley began as Sir Thomas Gresham’s 1570s mansion and was refashioned in the 1760s–80s for th...

History

#39

Wellington Arch

A triumphal arch with a life story: built in the 1820s as a royal gateway, rebranded for the Iron Duke, moved whole in the 1880s to ease traffic, then crowned i...

Library

#40

British Library

A national memory palace: 170-plus million items from Magna Carta to Beatles lyrics, housed in a purpose-built red-brick campus by St Pancras. Anyone can browse...

Transport

#41

Royal Mews

Working stables and rolling stock for royal ceremony. In one visit you’ll move from leather and brass in the harness room to 18th-century gilded theatre on whee...

Historic House

#42

Ham House

A time capsule on the Thames. Built for court insider William Murray in 1610 and perfected by the formidable Duchess of Lauderdale, Ham House keeps more 17th-ce...

Military

#43

Household Cavalry Museum

Part living barracks, part museum, this is Britain’s mounted guard seen from the inside. In historic Horse Guards, you look through a glass wall into working st...

Archaeology

#44

London Mithraeum

A Roman mystery cult beneath a 21st-century HQ. The Temple of Mithras, discovered in 1954 and painstakingly returned to its original riverside level, is staged ...

Art

#45

Moco Museum

Moco’s London outpost brings the brand’s Amsterdam energy to Oxford Street: punchy contemporary names, pop-art provocations, and immersive digital rooms in a co...

Art

#46

Queen's House

Inigo Jones’s cool, mathematical masterpiece (1616–36) anchors Greenwich like a tuning fork for British classicism. Inside, a quiet jewel box of art—Tudor to co...

Art

#47

Courtauld Gallery

A jewel box inside Somerset House: small enough to see in 60–90 minutes, rich enough to change how you look at painting. The Courtauld’s top-floor Impressionism...

Multiple

#48

Forty Hall Museum

North London’s Jacobean surprise: a 1620s gabled manor set in rolling parkland, orchards and lakes. Built for Sir Nicholas Rainton—silk merchant, Lord Mayor, an...

Art

#49

The Photographers' Gallery

Britain’s first gallery devoted solely to photography (founded 1971) and still its most agile. Five compact floors rotate from documentary to fashion to experim...

Military

#50

National Army Museum

Chelsea’s compact, modern take on four centuries of the British Army. Five galleries (from ‘Soldier’ to ‘Society’) mix kit and campaigns with personal stories, ...

Food

#51

Twinings Museum

At 216 Strand, the world’s narrowest powerhouse of tea history squeezes a mini-museum, tasting bar and shop into London’s longest-running retail address (since ...

Art

#52

Whitechapel Gallery

An East End engine for new art since 1901, Whitechapel Gallery pairs risk-taking shows with community energy. Expect punchy, idea-led exhibitions across a compa...

Art And Historic House

#53

Museum of the Home

A quick, clever walk through 400 years of everyday life. Set in 1714 almshouses, the museum flips between reconstructed ‘Rooms Through Time’ (from a 1630s parlo...

History

#54

Jack the Ripper Museum

A compact, atmospheric walkthrough of 1888 Whitechapel built inside a Victorian townhouse. Rooms reconstruct a victim’s sitting room, a police station corner an...

Historic House

#55

Charles Dickens Museum

Dickens’s only surviving London home (48 Doughty Street) is intimate, readable and packed with originals. He wrote ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ here; ...

Numismatic

#56

Bank of England Museum

Free, focused, and much more fun than you think. In under an hour you’ll lift a real ~13 kg gold bar (through a secure hatch), meet famous banknotes, and see ho...

Historic House

#57

Down House

Darwin’s home laboratory, writing room and thinking garden. Inside, ground-floor rooms are restored to family life; upstairs galleries unpack voyages, notebooks...

Prison

#58

Clink Prison Museum

Immersive social-history displays on London's most notorious ecclesiastical prison. The museum reconstructs cells, fetters and punishment devices to explain how...

Medical

#59

Chelsea Physic Garden

Founded in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, this is London's oldest botanic garden dedicated to medicinal plants. Living collections are arranged...

Historic House

#60

Kew Palace

Britain's smallest royal palace: a 1630s Dutch-style brick house later adopted by the Georgian court. Rooms and interpretation focus on George III, Queen Charlo...

Art

#61

William Morris Gallery

Morris’s childhood home in Walthamstow is now the world’s only public museum devoted to his life and the Arts & Crafts movement. The galleries balance beauty an...

Art

#62

Somerset House

A riverside palace turned powerhouse of art and ideas. The present neoclassical complex (1776–1801) by Sir William Chambers was purpose-built for national insti...

Historic House

#63

Fulham Palace

For over 1,200 years this riverside estate was the country-in-the-city home of the Bishops of London. Today you wander a patchwork: medieval traces, Tudor brick...

Medical

#64

Hunterian Museum

Inside the Royal College of Surgeons, the Hunterian reframes 18th-century ‘anatomy fever’ for a modern audience. John Hunter’s specimen empire—once fuelled by c...

Art

#65

Guildhall Art Gallery

The City of London’s collection leans Victorian and London-centric, shown in bright, purpose-built rooms above the capital’s Roman amphitheatre. Come for big na...

Media

#66

Museum of Brands

A time-tunnel through 150+ years of everyday stuff—packaging, adverts, toys, tech—arranged by decade so you feel how design, prices and priorities shift. It’s c...

Art

#67

Royal Academy of Arts

Founded in 1768 and still artist-led, the RA mixes blockbuster shows with the world’s longest-running open-submission exhibition (the Summer Exhibition). Expect...

Historic House

#68

Freud Museum

Sigmund Freud’s final home in Hampstead is preserved around his study and world-famous couch, brought from Vienna in 1938. Books crowd the walls; antiquities si...

Art

#69

Leighton House Museum

Victorian artist Frederic, Lord Leighton built this studio-home as a total artwork: a working atelier fronted by a jewel-box of Islamic-inspired interiors. The ...

Maritime

#70

Golden Hinde

A working replica of Sir Francis Drake’s galleon, launched in 1973, moored at St Mary Overie Dock. Unlike most replicas, she earned her salt at sea: transatlant...

History

#71

Battle of Britain Bunker

Sixty feet under Uxbridge, this operations room ran Fighter Command’s No. 11 Group—the London sector—during 1940. Here the Dowding System stitched radar plots, ...

Multiple

#72

The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History

Part cocktail bar, part cabinet of wonders in Hackney. Upstairs: absinthe and oddities; downstairs: a dense, dim grotto of taxidermy, shells, bones, erotica, fo...

Art

#73

Institute of Contemporary Arts

A restless laboratory on The Mall since 1946, the ICA mixes exhibitions, performance, talks and an arthouse cinema to test what ‘contemporary’ can be. Expect ri...

Historic House

#74

Syon House

London’s great time-capsule: a Tudor-era power site wrapped in Robert Adam’s most theatrical interiors and set within sweeping parkland. Inside, Adam turns room...

Medical

#75

Wellcome Collection

Free, lively and reflective: part gallery, part ideas lab on Euston Road. The permanent displays mix medicine’s past with present debates—bodies, minds, contagi...

Medical

#76

Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret

Creak up a church’s spiral stair to Europe’s oldest surviving operating theatre (1822), once serving the women’s ward of St Thomas’ Hospital. Before anaesthesia...

Gardening

#77

Garden Museum

Britain’s story of gardening told inside a rescued riverside church. The nave hosts nimble exhibitions on plants, people and design; side aisles trace tools, se...

Sport

#78

Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum

Centre Court’s backstage story in one compact hit: how a croquet lawn became the most-watched patch of grass on earth. Expect early rackets and fashions, trophy...

Biographical

#79

Stephens Collection

A pocket museum with big local punch: the story of Dr Henry Stephens’s indelible blue-black ink, his son Henry ‘Inky’ Stephens, and the Finchley estate they sha...

Historic House

#80

Apsley House

‘Number One, London’—the Duke of Wellington’s townhouse beside Hyde Park—mixes grand rooms with a trove of European art and Napoleonic history. The Waterloo Gal...

Art

#81

Cartoon Museum

A cheerful deep-dive into Britain’s wit on paper—from Georgian caricature to newspaper satire, underground comix and today’s graphic storytelling. It’s small, f...

Art

#82

artsdepot

North Finchley’s contemporary arts hub with two theatres, a gallery and studios under one roof. Programming spans touring drama, comedy, dance, family shows and...

Medical

#83

Florence Nightingale Museum

Inside St Thomas’ Hospital, this compact museum traces Nightingale’s life from privileged statistician to reformer who rebuilt nursing with data, training and s...

Multiple

#84

Foundling Museum

Britain’s first children’s charity and public art gallery under one roof: Thomas Coram’s 18th-century Foundling Hospital, supported by Handel, Hogarth and frien...

Technology

#85

London Museum of Water & Steam

Victorian London’s thirst, solved in iron and steam. On the old Kew Bridge pumping station, vast beam engines and story-led displays explain how river water bec...

Technology

#86

Brunel Museum

A small museum with a colossal story: the world’s first tunnel under a navigable river. Marc Brunel’s shield and his 19-year-old son Isambard turned a dangerous...

Historic House

#87

Strawberry Hill

Horace Walpole’s ‘little Gothic castle’ is a manifesto in plaster and light: a playful, brainy reboot of medieval style that launched the Gothic Revival and hel...

Local

#88

Gunnersbury Park Museum

A free, local-history heavyweight inside an Italianate Rothschild mansion. Displays stitch together Ealing and Hounslow’s stories—industry, immigration, leisure...

Religious

#89

All Hallows-by-the-Tower Crypt Museum

London’s oldest surviving City church (AD 675) hides a compact archaeological tunnel under the nave. A Roman pavement, Saxon fragments and wartime scars fold tw...

History

#90

Dennis Severs' House

Part time machine, part theatre. Artist Dennis Severs (1948–1999) staged a Huguenot silk-weavers’ home as if its family has just stepped out—candles guttering, ...

Local

#91

Harrow Museum

Also known as Headstone Manor & Museum, this is a rare, fully moated medieval manor complex folded into suburbia. A free, family-friendly site where you can ste...

Historic House

#92

Lambeth Palace

Home and workplace of the Archbishop of Canterbury for 800+ years. Tours (on selected days) thread Tudor brickwork, state rooms and chapels with one of London’s...

Historic House

#93

Handel Hendrix House

Two neighbours separated by 200 years share one Mayfair address: George Frideric Handel (1723–59) and Jimi Hendrix (1968–69). The museum stitches their worlds t...

Museum

#94

Vagina Museum

Cheerfully serious and science-led, this museum tackles reproductive anatomy, health and myth-busting with clear labels, art commissions and a welcoming tone. S...

Archaeology

#95

Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology

A scholar’s treasure room: 80,000+ objects in narrow cases that reward slow looking. This is Egyptology without blockbuster theatrics—beads, tools, fabrics, and...

Local

#96

Burgh House & Hampstead Museum

A handsome early-18th-century Hampstead townhouse turned community museum and salon. Expect a mix of local history, changing art shows, and a mellow café-garden...

History

#97

Jewel Tower

A rare survivor of medieval Westminster: a stone keep (c.1360s) tucked behind Parliament. Three compact floors explain its shifts—from royal strongroom to the n...

Art

#98

Camden Arts Centre

A former Victorian library turned nimble contemporary art hub. Expect changing shows, residencies, talks, and a pocket garden with a mellow café. The appeal is ...

Art

#99

Dulwich Picture Gallery

The world’s first purpose-built public art gallery (1811–17) and still a masterclass in how to hang Old Masters. Soane’s top-lit suite makes Rembrandt, Poussin ...

Historic House

#100

Pitzhanger Manor

Sir John Soane’s west-London showpiece: a compact country retreat where he tested the tricks that made his name—top light, shallow domes, witty perspective, and...

Historic House

#101

Red House

William Morris’s experiment in how to live beautifully—designed by his friend Philip Webb in 1859—Red House reads like an Arts & Crafts manifesto built in brick...

Military

#102

Guards Museum

A focused, artifact-rich introduction to the Foot Guards regiments next to their working barracks by St James’s Park. Uniforms, colours, battlefield relics and ...

History

#103

Bentley Priory Museum

Headquarters of RAF Fighter Command in 1940—the nerve centre of the Dowding System that fused radar, observers and sector stations into one lethal decision-mach...

Medical

#104

Museum of the Order of St John

A compact, free museum that unpacks 900 years of the Hospitaller story—from medieval care for pilgrims to today’s St John Ambulance—set inside the Order’s Londo...

Historic House

#105

Marble Hill House

A perfectly scaled Palladian villa on the Thames, built for Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk. Free to enter, it’s a crisp lesson in Georgian taste set with...

Historic House

#106

Fenton House

A 17th-century Hampstead merchant’s house with a secret: upstairs sits the Benton Fletcher collection of early keyboard instruments. Add porcelain, needlework, ...

Art

#107

Orleans House Gallery

A river-edge arts hub wrapped around James Gibbs’s jewel-box Octagon Room (1720). Only fragments of the once-vast Orleans House survive, but the Octagon’s baroq...

Sport

#108

World Rugby Museum

Inside Twickenham Stadium, this hands-on museum traces rugby union from schoolyard origins to the professional era, with England memorabilia, global stories, an...

Historic House

#109

Valentines Mansion

A 1690s country house in Ilford with Georgian rooms, a recreated Victorian kitchen and lively gardens—plus community arts and music in the walled garden keep it...

Art

#110

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art

A jewel-box museum in a Georgian townhouse dedicated to modern Italian art—especially Futurism—plus a cosy café, garden seating and a sharp bookshop.

Historic House

#111

Rainham Hall

Atmospheric early-18th-century Queen Anne house near Rainham station; National Trust storytelling focuses on its many residents and changing uses, alongside a c...

Music

#112

Musical Museum

Hands-on Brentford gem devoted to mechanical music—music boxes, player pianos, and a mighty Wurlitzer brought to life with guided demos and events.

Local

#113

Bruce Castle Museum

Tottenham’s Tudor-to-Victorian manor turned local-history hub—free to visit, set in parkland, with galleries on borough stories, post, industry and community li...

Art

#114

South London Gallery

Free contemporary art across two sites—the main gallery and the former Fire Station—plus a beloved bookshop, café and a weekend-access garden.

Historic House

#115

Spencer House

An 18th-century aristocratic townhouse with meticulously restored state rooms and a terrace garden—visited by guided tour.

Fashion

#116

Fan Museum

Charming Greenwich townhouse dedicated to the art and craft of the hand fan, with jewel-box displays, an Orangery for events and a petite tea room.

Historic House

#117

Keats House

Romantic poet John Keats’s Hampstead home and garden, with rooms, manuscripts and programmes that bring his short, prolific life into focus.

Historic House

#118

Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge

Intimate Tudor hunting lodge on the edge of Epping Forest with period interiors, views and hands-on family activities.

Transport

#119

London Canal Museum

Compact, story-rich museum in a former ice warehouse: London’s canals, working boats and the city’s historic ice trade.

Science And Art

#120

Science Gallery London

King’s College London’s free art–science hub: compact, thoughtful exhibitions that blend research with lived experience.

Local

#121

Valence House Museum

A rare historic manor in Barking & Dagenham with galleries on local archaeology, industry and everyday life, plus gardens and a friendly café.

Mill

#122

Wimbledon Windmill Museum

A compact volunteer-run museum inside a 19th-century windmill on Wimbledon Common, explaining milling and wind power with hands-on models.

Design

#123

The Building Centre

Independent hub for architecture and the built environment: rotating exhibitions plus a materials/manufacturer showcase and café.

Art And History

#124

Queer Britain

Britain’s first dedicated LGBTQ+ museum: compact, free, and community-driven, mixing art, archives and lived histories near King’s Cross.

Education

#125

Ragged School Museum

Atmospheric East End site telling the story of Victorian ‘ragged’ schools—free education for the poorest children—plus a recreated classroom and home interior.

Historic House

#126

Dr Johnson's House

Grade I listed 18th-century townhouse where Samuel Johnson compiled his Dictionary; intimate rooms, rich interpretation and a tranquil courtyard in the City.

Military

#127

Royal Armouries, Tower of London

Inside the White Tower, a flagship display of the Royal Armouries: royal suits, tournament gear and arms spanning from the Middle Ages to the gunpowder era.

Transport

#128

Whitewebbs Museum of Transport

Volunteer-run trove inside a Victorian pumping station: vintage cars, bikes and commercials, plus toys, model railways and engineering ephemera.

Historic House

#129

Danson House

Elegantly restored Georgian villa in Danson Park—historic interiors by day, beloved wedding venue on weekends.

Medical

#130

Bethlem Museum of the Mind

Moving, free museum on the Bethlem Royal Hospital campus—patient art (Wain, Dadd, others) alongside the history of mental-health care and changing treatments.

Local

#131

Redbridge Museum

Freshly refurbished local-history museum inside Ilford Central Library: clear storytelling on Ilford/Redbridge with family-friendly interactives.

Transport

#132

Walthamstow Pumphouse Museum

Compact volunteer-led industrial museum in a historic pump house: working steam engines, Victoria line carriages, model railway and local firefighting exhibits.

Historic House

#133

Benjamin Franklin House

The only surviving home of Benjamin Franklin worldwide: immersive guided visit to his London residence with science, politics and a curious archaeological tale.

Art

#134

Ranger's House (Wernher Collection)

Elegant Georgian villa on Greenwich Park housing the eclectic Wernher Collection: Renaissance/Baroque paintings, dazzling jewellery, silver, porcelain and sculp...

Art

#135

Bankside Gallery

Riverside gallery, home to the Royal Watercolour Society and Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers; free, frequently changing shows plus quality prints, books an...

Local

#136

Honeywood Museum

Charming historic house by Carshalton Ponds with local-history rooms, period interiors and family activities; free entry with tea room.

Historic House

#137

Hogarth's House

Free, compact museum in William Hogarth’s former home. Focus on prints, plates and interpretation rather than furnished period rooms; small ‘exhibition garden’.

Art

#138

Brunei Gallery

SOAS University gallery with rotating exhibitions on Africa and Asia—historic and contemporary art, photography and material culture; free entry with a rooftop ...

Masonic

#139

Library and Museum of Freemasonry

Free museum and research library inside Freemasons’ Hall: ritual regalia, symbolism, and social history, plus optional access (with paid multimedia guide) to th...

Law Enforcement

#140

Bow Street Museum of Crime and Justice

Compact museum in the former Bow Street police station/court tracing policing from the Bow Street Runners to late-20th-century Met history, with original cells ...

Local

#141

Kingston Museum

Free, compact local-history museum with a standout Eadweard Muybridge gallery, rotating art shows, and family-friendly activity space.

Biographical

#142

Heath Robinson Museum

Purpose-built, small museum celebrating W. Heath Robinson’s whimsical drawings and ‘over-complicated’ contraptions; two compact galleries, shop and adjacent par...

History

#143

Greenwich Visitor Centre

More than a desk: an engaging, free mini-museum on the Old Royal Naval College and Maritime Greenwich UNESCO site, with family interactives; some paid add-ons u...

Historic House

#144

Sutton House

National Trust Tudor townhouse (1535) in Hackney with oak-panelled rooms, carved fireplaces and a calm garden; compact, friendly and interpretation-rich.

Sport

#145

Arsenal Football Club Museum

A crisp, object-led history of Arsenal from Dial Square (1886) to the Emirates era. Match-used shirts and boots, trophies and medals, Highbury artefacts and wom...

Local

#146

Hackney Museum

Friendly, free local-history museum inside Hackney Central Library with hands-on family activities and exhibitions on migration, community, and everyday life.

Medical

#147

Fleming Museum

A compact, story-rich site at St Mary’s Hospital where Alexander Fleming observed a mould killing bacteria in 1928. A faithful lab reconstruction, a concise fil...

Historic House

#148

Boston Manor House

A restored Jacobean manor set in parkland, best known for richly decorated interiors—including a showpiece plaster ceiling—and rotating displays tying local sto...

Local

#149

Museum of Croydon

Croydon’s people, places and work lives told through donated objects and oral histories, with a shift upstairs to the Riesco Gallery’s Chinese ceramics and loca...

Art

#150

Kennel Club Dog Art Gallery

Appointment-only gallery and library of canine art in the Kennel Club’s Mayfair HQ; free, guided visits with knowledgeable staff—dogs have even been welcomed on...

Art

#151

Pushkin House

Independent cultural centre in Bloomsbury with a lively events programme (talks, book launches, art, film), a well-stocked bookshop and a cosy bar—programming s...

Historic House

#152

Carlyle's House

A preserved Victorian writers’ home where Thomas and Jane Carlyle lived, wrote and hosted London’s literary and scientific circles. Domestic rooms, portraits an...

Military

#153

Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum

Compact but dense with originals, this museum-archive tells the story of Poland’s armed forces in exile and the Polish Government-in-Exile in London during WWII...

Art

#154

Studio Voltaire

Artist-focused contemporary art space in Clapham known for adventurous curating and newly expanded galleries. Recent shows pair unexpected voices—think Beryl Co...

Religious

#155

Wesley's Chapel, Museum of Methodism and John Wesley's House

The ‘Mother Church of World Methodism’ with a museum in the crypt and Wesley’s Georgian townhouse next door. Documents, portraits and everyday objects chart the...

Music

#156

RCM Museum of Music

Inside the Royal College of Music, this teaching museum turns 500 years of music-making into a compact, object-rich story. Historic instruments (strings, winds,...

Art

#157

Dorich House

Artist’s house–museum designed and built for sculptor Dora Gordine and her husband, the Russian-art scholar Richard Hare. Completed in the mid-1930s as a live–w...

Art

#158

Borough Road Gallery

LSBU’s on-campus gallery devoted to David Bomberg and the Borough Group. Centred on the Sarah Rose Collection, it charts Bomberg’s post-war teaching at Borough ...

Historic House

#159

Whitehall

A Grade II* listed, timber-framed Tudor hall house in Cheam (c.1500) that layers 500 years of local history under one roof. Displays pair the building’s own fab...

Local

#160

Islington Museum

A borough museum focused on people and place, with thematic galleries on Work, Home, Leisure, Radicalism and ‘Hidden Islington’. Strong on stories unique to the...

Art

#161

House of Dreams Museum

Artist Stephen Wright has transformed his South London home into a total-environment artwork—walls, floors, garden and furniture become a continuous mosaic and ...

Local

#162

Barnet Museum

Community-run local history museum charting Barnet from medieval crossroads to coaching hub and suburbia. Displays knit together the 1471 Battle of Barnet, the ...

Military

#163

Fusiliers Museum

Set within the Tower of London, this regimental museum follows the Royal Fusiliers from their 17th-century origins to the present. Uniforms, colours, weapons, s...

Art

#164

Chisenhale Gallery

Artist-centred and commissioning-led, Chisenhale Gallery presents new work—often first UK institutional solo shows—by emerging to mid-career artists. Housed in ...

Local

#165

Museum of Wimbledon

Run by the Wimbledon Society, this small local-history museum stitches together the story of Wimbledon from its Iron Age hillfort and medieval manor to suburban...

Medical

#166

Royal Pharmaceutical Society Museum

A compact but authoritative survey of British pharmacy: apothecary jars and shop fittings, materia medica (plant, animal and mineral drugs), pill machines and p...

Biographical

#167

Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare

An 18th-century riverside ‘folly’ built by actor-manager David Garrick as a private temple to Shakespeare and to his own theatrical ideals. The small Palladian ...

Local

#168

Havering Museum

Local-history museum for the London Borough of Havering, connecting Romford, Hornchurch, Upminster and Rainham through archaeology, market-town life, industries...

Sport

#169

MCC Museum

Inside Lord’s—the ‘Home of Cricket’—this is one of the world’s oldest dedicated cricket museums. Galleries trace the game from 18th-century laws and hand-hewn b...

Art

#170

Kelmscott House Museum

In the basement and coach house of William Morris’s Hammersmith home, the William Morris Society presents small, focused displays on Morris’s craft, politics an...

Medical

#171

Langdon Down Museum of Learning Disability

Housed in the Victorian Normansfield site created by Dr John Langdon Down, the physician who described the clinical features of Down’s syndrome. The museum pair...

Art

#172

Landmark Arts Centre

A soaring late-Victorian former church re-cast as a community arts venue. Its vast nave, tall arcades and stained glass now frame exhibitions, concerts and fair...

Local

#173

Museum of Richmond

A civic museum mapping Richmond’s long arc—from the medieval riverside settlement and royal Tudor palace to Georgian spa culture, Victorian bridges and 20th-cen...

Art

#174

Cubitt Gallery

An artist-run contemporary art space operated by the Cubitt Artists co-operative, pairing a changing exhibitions programme with studios and a long-running curat...

Archaeology

#175

Rose Theatre Exhibition

A conservation-led display around the archaeological remains of the Rose, the 1587 Bankside playhouse built by Philip Henslowe. Visitors encounter the plan of t...

Religious

#176

Salvation Army International Heritage Centre

The global archive-museum of The Salvation Army, housed at William Booth College (1929–31, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott). Collections trace the movement from William...

Industry

#177

Wandle Industrial Museum

A focused community museum interpreting the River Wandle’s working valley—from calico-printing and dyeing at Merton Abbey Mills to snuff, brewing and early rail...

Historic House

#178

Queen Charlotte's Cottage

An 18th-century ‘cottage orné’ retreat for Queen Charlotte and George III within Kew Gardens, prized today as a rare survival of the Picturesque fashion. Inside...

Local

#179

Twickenham Museum

A compact, object-led survey of Twickenham, Strawberry Hill and the Thames islands that shaped them. Displays braid together literary Twickenham (Pope and Walpo...

Historic House

#180

Little Holland House

An Arts & Crafts ‘total work of art’ designed and largely hand-made by artist Frank R. Dickinson in the early 1900s. The house preserves its original interiors—...

Local

#181

Brent Museum

Inside Willesden Green Library, this gallery stitches Brent’s story from prehistory to present with objects you can read close-up: British Empire Exhibition sou...

Ballet

#182

White Lodge Museum and Ballet Resource Centre

Inside an 18th-century royal hunting lodge in Richmond Park, the Royal Ballet School’s museum tells the story of British ballet through objects dancers actually...

Art

#183

Morley Gallery

Morley Gallery is the public-facing gallery of Morley College London, a historic adult-education institution. It mixes curated contemporary exhibitions with rig...

Art

#184

The Showroom

A laboratory for new commissions rather than a salon of greatest hits, The Showroom invites artists to make first-time, large-scale projects that grow out of re...

Art

#185

Art in Perpetuity Trust

Artist-founded and artist-run since the mid-1990s, APT anchors Deptford’s creekside arts ecology with long-term studios and a public gallery. Expect contemporar...

Military

#186

Royal Hospital Chelsea Museum

The in-house museum of the 17th-century Royal Hospital Chelsea—founded by Charles II and built by Sir Christopher Wren—tells the story of the Chelsea Pensioners...

Archaeology

#187

Crofton Roman Villa

A compact archaeological site preserving the ground plan and fabric of a Romano-British villa beside today’s Orpington station. Under a protective cover you rea...

Music

#188

Royal Academy of Music Museum

A focused museum inside Britain’s oldest conservatoire (1822) that treats instruments as both artworks and machines for sound. The Strings and Keyboard gallerie...

Art

#189

Goldsmiths' Centre

Clerkenwell’s hub for contemporary jewellery and silversmithing where exhibitions foreground making as much as finished showpieces. Established by the Worshipfu...

Medical

#190

Anaesthesia Heritage Centre

A focused medical-history museum charting how people were made insensible to pain—from laughing gas experiments to ether and chloroform, and onward to modern an...

Art

#191

Canada House Gallery

A compact Trafalgar Square showcase inside the Canadian High Commission that rotates exhibitions of Canadian art and craft—often foregrounding Indigenous artist...

Local

#192

Enfield Museum

Small but story-dense local-history displays that link the borough to innovations used worldwide—from water engineering and armaments to retail technology. Expe...

Art

#193

MOCA, London

An independent project space in Peckham curated by artist–scholar Michael Petry, MOCA London stages compact, idea-driven exhibitions across sculpture, installat...

Art

#194

Lethaby Gallery

Central Saint Martins’ on-site gallery for exhibitions drawn from teaching, research and the Museum & Study Collection—named for Arts & Crafts architect-educato...

Medical

#195

British Optical Association Museum

One of the world’s most comprehensive collections for the vision sciences: thousands of spectacles, lenses, charts, opticians’ tools and diagnostic devices trac...

Art

#196

L-13 Light Industrial Workshop

A deliberately unruly gallery–publisher–workshop known for editions, multiples and collaborations with provocative British artists. Expect prints, objects and t...

History

#197

Wiener Library

The UK’s principal archive and exhibition centre devoted to the Holocaust, Nazi persecution and later genocides. Founded by Dr Alfred Wiener from the 1930s as a...

Medical

#198

Royal College of Physicians Museum

Collections of Britain’s oldest medical royal college (chartered 1518): portraits of leading physicians, silver and ceremonial objects, rare pharmacopoeias and ...

Medical

#199

British Red Cross Museum and Archives

A focused collections and archive hub preserving the British Red Cross’s material memory—from field uniforms and first-aid kits to posters, badges, and case fil...

Archaeology

#200

Institute of Archaeology Collections

UCL’s teaching-and-research collections: study sets of prehistoric lithics, Roman and Classical ceramics, and global material-culture samples used to train arch...

Art

#201

Centre for Recent Drawing

A non-commercial platform dedicated to drawing as an expanded, contemporary practice—exhibitions, residencies and an evolving study archive present everything f...

Art

#202

Campbell Works

An artist-run project space known for tightly curated contemporary art exhibitions, public realm projects and publications. Programmes often foreground collabor...

Local

#203

Merton Heritage Centre

The borough’s memory store: maps, photographs, oral histories and objects tracing Merton’s villages—Mitcham, Morden and Wimbledon—from rural commons and mills t...

Local

#204

Bromley Museum

Small local-history museum for the Borough of Bromley: social history, archaeology and changing displays about the area’s people and places.

Medical

#205

Galton Collection

A compact, critical look at Sir Francis Galton’s restless mind—part inventor, part statistician, and a deeply problematic eugenicist. Cases gather his fingerpri...

Music

#206

Museum of Army Music

Once housed at Kneller Hall, the Museum of Army Music told the story of British military bands—how sound organised marching feet and battlefield signals long be...

Natural History

#207

Museum of Life Sciences

The Museum of Life Sciences is a compact, quietly fascinating study collection at King's College London. It brings together nineteenth- and twentieth-century te...

Art

#208

Red Mansion Foundation

A London platform for contemporary Chinese art and UK–China dialogue, best known for exhibitions and residencies that place emerging voices alongside establishe...