Museums Open Tonight (until 20:00+)

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 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...

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...

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 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...

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

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...

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 ...

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

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

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...

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...

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...

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