London Museums Open Tomorrow

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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, ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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, ...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

‘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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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, ...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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

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.

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

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

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...

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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

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

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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