I absolutely love this place…read more The gallery is decked out in Monet, Van Gogh and Holbein. The best piece in this gallery is the execution of Jane grey(in my opinion). Additionally, the gift shop had the cutest totes and post cards. You can honestly spend the whole day here if you wanted to. The only downside was the fact that the place was busy beyond imagination.

I visited the National Gallery with my husband when we were exploring London for a few days earlier…read morethis month. The truth is we meant to visit the National Portrait Gallery (which is right around the corner), but I didn't realize my mistake until we were already trying to figure our way around the National Gallery and we decided to stay for a while. I found the museum difficult to navigate even with a map, so we just sort of wandered. We saw incredible paintings. The highlights for me were works by Henri Rousseau, Max Pechstein, Jan van Goyen Ferdinand Hodler... We saw an incredible Manet (The Execution of Maximilian) and a painting by Paul Gauguin that was unlike any other Gauguin I've ever seen. These were just some of my favorites, but the galleries are chronological and have works by every painter you could think of: Botticelli, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Turner, Monet, Seurat, van Gogh... It's not your museum for modern and contemporary art, but if you're in the mood for European art from 1200-1900, the National Gallery will blow you away. They also host temporary exhibits and have several great options for a drink or a bite to eat. We stopped by Ochre, where we really enjoyed their happy hour. It's free to visit (although they appreciate donations), so you can pop in for however much time you have, whether that's a half our or three! The National Gallery might not have been our intended museum and we couldn't stay too long or miss out on the museum next door, but it really wowed me. Next time, I'll visit on purpose and save more time to explore and enjoy.

I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum about two weeks ago. I think the V&A might be the first…read moremuseum I ever loved. I remember going as a little girl, seeing their fashion gallery, and falling in love. I hadn't been in years, and I was excited to see it through my adult eyes that have visited a lot more museum than 12-year-old me. The museum is incredible. It's enormous, labyrinthine. I got lost repeatedly. But it's the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts, and design, so that's no surprise. I had a glass of wine in the Garden Cafe, while I studied the map. Then we went up the Ceramic Staircase (a incredible architectural feature that dates back to 1865-1871) and wandered through gallery after gallery (Tapestries, Theatre & Performance, Photography Centre). We probably saw 8% of the museum's galleries. Then it was time for us to make our way to the exhibition "Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art." This exhibit was incredible, showcasing designs by Elsa Schiaperelli back in the 1920s all the way to the present (designs by the fashion house's current creative director Daniel Roseberry). Since the fashion gallery is closed until 2028, it was great to see some fashion on my first visit to the V&A in at least a decade. The museum is free to visit (exhibits have an admission cost), and it's an incredible museum - well worth a visit for anyone visiting London for the first time or the 100th. Even if you just have a half hour, you can't go wrong with a stroll through this incredible, beautiful museum.

Date: August 29, 2026…read more Experience: I will say this about each museum we got to stop by at during our tour: "I wish I could've stayed there longer." Our restroom breaks on the tour were sometimes at museums since museum entry was free in the UK, which I am totally jealous of because I come from the US and we pay to enter museums. We had about 30 minutes to use the restroom and to look around at the displays on top of checking out the gift shop. If memory serves me right, this museum displayed the best of the best from the different countries. My mom and I explored as much as we could with the little time we had, with my interests being perked by the religious items on display to only discover sections for Asian countries and a whole two rooms housing gigantic statues and artwork. I took as many pictures as I could to view for later, but we only made a small dent on what we could see with the little time we had. I did end up getting postcards from the gift shop that also housed so many different items to pick from related to both the museum and just the UK in general. Hands down would go back in the future to check it out fully.

Owned by the National Trust and built on the site of some old farm labourer's cottages, 2 Willow…read moreRoad is the homelier side of architectural brutalism. When it was built it sparked controversy, but today it looks in keeping with the rest of Willow Road. Inside is a well-designed, comfortable living space which was arranged for the parties the Goldfingers used to throw. There is a film showing the history of the site and the lifestyle of the family who lived here. The furniture was specially designed and includes a wonderful desk. The only part of the plot which the Goldfingers weren't bothered for is the garden - so most of this land was given over to the neighbours. Opening times are irregular, so worth checking before visiting.

Interested in quirky architecture or modern art? Want to go somewhere different in London? Off the…read morebeaten track? This is the place! Designed by Erno Goldfinger (not the chap in the Bond film!), it's a house he built for his family in 1939 (opposite Hampstead Heath) Full of fascinating period pieces like sculptures by Moore and Ernst.There's art by Ben Nicholson and Bridgit Riley and others. It's now owned by the National Trust, so if you're a member why not make a day of it and check out nearby Fenton House too? (nb they don't have a public loo, so find somewhere to 'go' first!)

Absolutely loved this museum. As a mass consumer myself, I really appreciated learning about the…read moredevelopment of brands throughout time. FOr instance, the first products were made to celebrate events such as the crowning of a Queen whereas now, there's strong brand associations with the products that are made. Also, they have a lot of childhood nostalgia items that anyone will appreciate, like groovy chick? I hadn't thought about that brand for a long long time before my visit! I also appreciate how easy the museum is to walk through. The exhibit is organized based on a timeline, also its a straight path so you'll definitely be able to see everything you want to. It's also kind of funny to see at the end of the exhibit there's just a giant case full of Frozen items. Definitely, a must-see when in London. Highly recommend it as the consumers that we have grown into today.

It's educational, fascinating, and very fun…read more Fans of print media, culture, and people that don't want to miss a beat will enjoy the history on display.

Marvelous place, the Tate Modern, though unfortunately my children did not see the appeal…read more I had fond memories of our first visit, back in 2010, and wanted to peek into the Tate during a family outing along South Bank last month. I love London's free museums, which make this sort of perfunctory drop-in both easy and practical. Our kids didn't like the Musée d'Orsay, so we didn't have high hopes for the Tate, especially after a long walk from the London Eye. We'd barely gotten them up the escalators and into one of the exhibit halls when they started saying they wanted to leave. We admired what we could of the heavy-hitting collection. We also talked to our children about some of the art, and maybe a trickle of it got through. There was a still life I loved, that turned out to be a Picasso, and a Mondrian painting I'm pretty sure I learned about in first or second grade. Our six-year-old volunteered that he liked a still life of a beer mug by Fernand Léger, and both kids were drawn, just a little, to Warhol's Marilyn Diptych. I hope the boys remember this quick visit, but if not, I certainly will. Maybe I'll bring them back when they're older, and we can give the Tate the time it deserves.

I visited the Tate Modern for the first time earlier this month when I visited London for a few…read moredays with my husband. The Tate opened in 2000, but a new building opened in 2016. The museum is located in the former Bankside Power Station, and the museum's Turbine Hall is an incredibly large and open space (but I did wonder why they don't utilize the space to display any large sculptures since it's such an enormous and unused space). It's a striking space, it's one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the world. It's free to visit, but exhibits may have a cost unless you're a member of the museum. When we visited earlier this month, they had three exhibits: Frida: the Making of an Icon (though January 3, 2027); Ana Mendieta (through January 17, 2027); and Julio Le Parc: Light. Color. Action (through May 3, 2027). The Frida exhibit costs 25 pounds, the Mendieta 18 pounds, and the Le Parc 15 pounds. That means that if you wanted to visit all three exhibits, it would cost 58 pounds a person which is, I think, outrageous. I couldn't justify spending that much, so I picked one exhibit - the Frida exhibit - and then just explored the free galleries after our visit to the exhibit. The Frida exhibit (which was organized in collaboration was the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) was interesting. I've been lucky enough to see much of Frida Kahlo's works before in Mexico and Texas. But the exhibit included many works I had never seen before, and it also included works by artists that were friends or contemporaries of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and works by artists that were inspired by her. The inclusion of "Fridamania," the transformation of Kahlo into an icon, image, brand, made the exhibit different from other Frida exhibits I've seen. The exhibit was extremely crowded - but you have to expect that with an exhibit like this! I found the museum a little confusing to navigate, but we just wandered for the time that we had. Some of the works that really struck me were pieces by Gerhard Richter (the Cage paintings), Belkis Ayón, Sam Nhlengethwa, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Alberto Giacometti, David Hockney, Salman Toor, Mark Rothko, and more. The museum is definitely worth visiting, but I just didn't love it as much as I expected. Since it's free, I'm sure I'll be back to explore more of the permanent collection another time, but I did find it a little difficult to navigate and thought the exhibition admission prices were prohibitively expensive.

Big! Giant! Huge Collection! I think that describes this museum. Be prepared to spend at least half…read moreday here. For fast pace like me, it takes us 3 hours. This museum need reservations ahead of time. It is free to public. The museum is popular, if you try to get in at the day arrive, you have to hope not many reserve the ticket. The museum has a lot room with different regions in the world. Many of the collection even the host country doesn't have it. The Egypt collection includes the many types of mummies. This collection not even the Egypt has it. The entrance basically enter to the round section that connected to the different room. You may need a good leg to walk entire museum. They also have folding chairs that you can use and portable to open at the display.

It's not every museum that has a line wrapped around the building when it opens on a Monday…read moremorning. But the British Museum is the world's oldest public national museum, has the largest collection of artifacts of any museum in the world, and is the second most visited attraction in all of the United Kingdom. The museum is free to visit, but we reserved a timed entry ticket for when they opened on Monday morning. I suggest you do this, because people who had tickets were walking right through into the museum after a bag check, while people who had not bought tickets ahead of time were having to wait in another line to get in. The museum is so large and has so many artifacts, that it can be a little overwhelming. For that reason, we relied on the list of highlights of the museum to point us to certain artifacts we didn't want to miss: the Rosetta Stone; the colossal bust of Ramesses II (c. 1250 BC); Hoa Hakananai'a (basalt statue from Easter Island); the Ife head (Nigeria, ca. 1300-1400s); the Sutton Hoo ship burial (dating back to 7th century Britain); the Lewish Chessmen (Scottish, ca. 1150-1175); and more. Prepare for crowds and to be a little overwhelmed by people and artifacts and the size of the museum. If you want to see everything, be prepared to spend an entire in the museum. Since it's free, you can do as we did and just spend a couple of hours - that's all we had - and see what you can see (the highlights list helped)! But it's a great museum and easily one of the most important museums in the country.

The Wallace Collection is a free museum in a beautiful townhome near Manchester Square. I visited…read morewith my husband about two weeks ago to see their current temporary exhibit (more on that below), and we had a great visit. The museum is located in the former townhouse of the Seymore family - the Marquesses of Hertford. The museum is named after Sir Richard Wallace, who built a collection of fine and decorative arts from the 1th to the 19th centuries along, with the Marquesses of Hertford. The collection opened to public view in 1900. The townhouse itself is gorgeous. From the second I walked in and saw the staircase in the Entrance Hall, I knew I was in for a treat. With several gorgeous rooms, the museum is worth visiting to see a beautifully preserved 19th century London townhome. Each room has beautiful chandeliers, furniture, paintings, sculptures, and more. The museum also has a collection of European arms and armor, which take several rooms to display. In addition to their permanent collections, they also show temporary exhibitions. Right now and through November 29, their exhibit is "Winston Churchill: The Painter," which is the first major retrospective of Sir Winston Churchill's paintings since his death and brings together more than 50 of his works (half of which come from private collections). While visiting the museum is free, there is a fee to visit the temporary exhibit (20 pounds for adults, 18 if you buy online ahead of time). The exhibit was incredible and well worth a visit. I learned a lot about Churchill that I didn't know prior to the exhibit (most of what I knew about him concerned his political leadership), and I found many of his paintings quite beautiful and moving. Whether you're visiting for a temporary exhibit or just to see the townhouse and its permanent collection, the Wallace Collection is incredible. It's a special museum in London, well worth including on an itinerary for a trip to London.

I went to see the exhibition of Churchill paintings. It was absolutely stunning! It was well…read morecurated, and the audio guide really gave you a sense of importance of painting in his life. I walked through the rest of the collection, which is almost overwhelming. There is a lot to see there. You really do need to use the audio guide, because there is so much art in a small space. I also appreciated the staff. They were helpful, without being intrusive. One of the things I enjoy the most was that people there were truly interested in art. They stopped and looked. Unlike the crowd at the National Gallery, which just went up to a painting, took a photo, and left without ever even looking at it.

We were in London during a heat wave and decided a museum day was in order, to entertain our…read morechildren away from the scorching sun. We settled on the Natural History Museum, and by the time we realized it would provide but faint relief, it was too late to go somewhere else. The Natural History Museum is one of London's spectacular free museums, a beautiful building on Exhibition Road in South Kensington. We were not, apparently, the only family who decided to visit on this hot Thursday afternoon in July, and we ended up waiting in a long, slow line, completely exposed to the sun. They might have put up some umbrellas, but I guess the weather was atypical. Once we were in, we learned that the museum is an old, historic building without much in the way of air conditioning. It was crowded and steamy in there, though still preferable to being outside. There were also a few newer exhibition halls that had proper AC. Thankfully, my three-year-old has a lifelong fascination with fans, and there were dozens of these on display, giant machines designed to ventilate large spaces. He was, in fact, more into these than he was into the dinosaurs, which scared the bejeezus out of him. The museum was definitely top tier, with tons of interesting exhibits to entertain both children and adults. We entered right into Hintze Hall, where a full blue whale skeleton hung suspended over our heads. We also admired a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite, dating back to the beginning of our solar system. The dinosaur hall was excellent, even if the animatronic T-rex made my little boy cry. We fell prey to one of the photo op stops, and I definitely paid for the downloads like a sucker--what, was I not gonna own the silly green screen pictures of my family among dinosaurs, and more importantly, looking at a camera at the same time? The mammal hall was cool, though I have to say, I missed the grand diorama displays of the mammal halls I've seen back home. We went into a newer exhibit on how to fix our broken planet, mostly for the air conditioning. My kids were less into the conservation stuff than the dinosaurs and fans, but I thought it was quite well done. I actually stopped buying beef treats for my dog as a result of one of the placards, which talked about the impact on the planet of using beef for pet food. We went to two gift shops, the one by the dinosaur hall and the main one near the entrance, and both were quite nice, with lots to look at for our kids. We allowed them to buy stuffies, and our three-year-old bought a tiny dodo and a tiny ankylosaurus (on theme, good job), while our six-year-old bought a flamingo to add to his flamingo collection. If there was a flamingo display at the museum, we missed it, though I suppose I wouldn't be surprised. I can tell by looking at the map now that we missed plenty. We spent a little time in the cafe, for fans and beverages, and I realized as we were leaving that I'd left my sunglasses there over an hour earlier. I was pleasantly surprised to find it at the register waiting for me. We take the kids to natural history museums at home, and I have no doubt we'd make good use of this one if we were raising them nearby. It's a wonderful place, expansive and educational, a truly amazing free resource to anyone spending time in London.

Lots of bones! Plenty of old stuff! Great turn-of-the-century over-the-top ornate architecture!…read morePlan on an hour unless you're hardcore. Ride the escalator into the middle of the earth to find out what music is playing inside. See extraordinary taxidermy handiwork. Even see a fake dodo bird thought to be an adjacent species that didn't exist. And if you like dinosaurs this is your Mecca. Just don't dare sit anywhere like on some stairs in the corner or some overzealous guard will kick you right out. But otherwise you'll have a great time. Also enjoy the outside grounds for a stroll, and hit up the West entrance for zero lines while the hoards line up on the other side.

This is an interesting cocktail bar/oddities museum. It is…read morefree to enter the bar, but if you want to go downstairs to the museum, I think it was £12. There was a discount if you bought a drink, but somehow this seemed too complicated for me to bother with so we just decided to not get drinks. Just as well, since you enter the museum via a tight spiral staircase which would not have been easy for me to navigate if holding or drinking a cocktail. There are lots of extremely interesting curiosities to look at. It is VERY cramped and you will probably not want to be carrying anything bulky. We did not stay too long there, because it was very, very warm in the museum area. It was a very hot day outside but it seemed that maybe they were running a heater in there?!? Though maybe it was an air conditioner that was...putting out hot air. But anyway, if you like 2-headed things and skeletons and whatnot, you might find it interesting enough; we did. Mostly the reason we went there was because we had come to this part of town to go to The Vagina Museum; I did prefer that one.

I don't know what this place is like in person but the online offerings are great and affordable…read more So many interesting lectures and talks. I hope there are more coming ondemand so I can catch up on what was missed. Enjoyed the 4 week magic class.

My very kind & generous sister treated us to lunch at The Keeper's House restaurant located on the…read moregrounds of this lovely place. Afterward we went to the Oceania exhibition which was really fascinating. From historic to contemporary, there was plenty to see. There are about 200 artifacts that range over a 500 year span. From shell, greenstone and ceramic ornaments, to huge canoes and stunning god images, you travel from room to room mesmerized by the craftsmanship & artistry. Please note that there are some human remains used in some of the displays. Really fascinating! The academy is based in the Burlington House which used to be the private residence of the Earl of Burlington. It's absolutely gorgeous! The institution is an independent & privately funded which got us the reservation at The Keeper's House. While this is not the usual museum or art gallery, this place is worth the trip.

My husband and I visited the Royal Academy of Arts a couple of weeks ago when we were visiting…read moreLondon for a few days. I'd never visited before and didn't know what to expect! The Royal Academy of Arts has an incredible and interesting history. It dates back to 1768, when it was founded through a personal act of King George III with a mission "to establish a school or academy of design for the use of students in the arts." Joshua Reynolds was its first president, but the Royal Academy has had dozens if not hundreds of famous leaders and students throughout its history. The Royal Academy's building in Piccadilly is beautiful, but it's not large. There is some art displayed in a few rooms of the building, but the main draw (certainly ours when we visited recently) is the large upstairs space used for the Academy's temporary exhibits. When we visited (and through October 25, 2026), the temporary exhibit is "Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam." Dadd was a student of the Royal Academy School. In the 1840s, he was becoming known as a painter of Shakespearean fairy scenes and paintings of his travels across the Mediterranean when he suffered a psychotic break and killed his father. He spent the rest of his life as a patient in two different psychiatric hospitals in London where he continued to produce oil paintings and watercolors. The exhibit was incredible. In addition to everything else, the Royal Academy has to offer, there's a little cafe in front of the museum, where lots of people were enjoying coffees and pastries on a beautiful day. Especially as the museum is in such a convenient location, with other attractions, amazing shops, restaurants, and bars around it, the Royal Academy is a great museum to include on a London itinerary - especially if you're interested in the temporary exhibit!