Free Museums in London
97 verified free museums in London. General admission to the permanent collection is free; temporary exhibitions and optional experiences may charge. 92 listings include published opening hours, and 6 currently offer guided tours. Museum listing compiled ; tour availability is refreshed hourly.
How this museum guide is compiled
Author: Weekend.London editorial and data team.
The index combines our reviewed museum catalogue with published opening hours and current tour availability. Admission is classified only from an explicit source: 208 of 208 records currently have a documented admission source. Missing or unclear evidence remains unknown; ticket or affiliate availability is never used to infer whether general entry is free or paid.
Museum catalogue reviewed . Opening hours can change, so confirm time-sensitive details on the museum's own page before travelling.
🏛️ Verified Free Museums in London (97)
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Map: Protomaps © OpenStreetMap
Multiple
#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...
Art
#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
#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...
Natural History
#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...
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...
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...
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...
Art
#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...
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...
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...
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...
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’ ...
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...
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
#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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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
#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.
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.
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.
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...
Local
#141
Kingston Museum
Free, compact local-history museum with a standout Eadweard Muybridge gallery, rotating art shows, and family-friendly activity space.
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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
#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...
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...
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...
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...
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
#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...
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 ...
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...