Fiona MacLeod Assesses Which of London’s Free National Collections Deserves Priority and Why the V&A Wins
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Fiona MacLeod | London Travel | prat.uk/author/fiona-macleod/
The Free Museum Situation
One of London’s genuinely extraordinary offerings for visitors is the network of free national museums that are funded by public money and are therefore free to enter, which is an arrangement that puts some of the world’s greatest collections within reach of anyone who can afford to get to London, regardless of whether they can afford to pay an entry fee at the destination. The arrangement is not universally understood: visitors from countries where museum admission is standard are sometimes surprised to discover that the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery, and several others charge nothing for general admission. The surprise is merited. The offering is extraordinary.
The question is: which one to prioritise? If you have a morning and one museum: the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. The V&A’s collection — decorative arts and design spanning five thousand years and every major global culture — is the most varied, the most beautiful in its presentation, and the most surprising in its contents of all the free national museums. You will find medieval European ironwork next to Japanese armour next to a room devoted to British fashion through the centuries next to a gallery of Renaissance paintings removed from Italian palaces. The building itself, which has been extended and improved across the Victorian original, is magnificent. The cafe is excellent. The shop is the best museum shop in London. The V&A is where to go.
The British Museum and Natural History Museum
The British Museum’s case needs no strong argument: it is one of the world’s great encyclopaedic museums, with the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, the Lewis Chessmen, the Lindow Man, and two million more objects that tell the story of human civilisation across time and geography. Its scale requires selectivity: spend a morning with a specific section rather than attempting to see everything, which is a plan that has defeated every visitor in the museum’s history. The Natural History Museum has the whale skeleton, the dinosaurs, the specific excitement of children encountering a life-size dinosaur skeleton for the first time, and the Darwin Centre’s scientific collections that add depth to the exhibition galleries. Both are essential. Both reward multiple visits.
The Visit London museum guide lists all the free institutions with opening hours, accessibility information, and pre-booking requirements where applicable. Pre-booking for the British Museum and Natural History Museum is now recommended for weekend visits, though the V&A accepts walk-ins for most of its space most of the time.
Mother’s Day at the Museum
Today is Mother’s Day. Several of London’s free museums are running Mother’s Day programming: family activities, special tours, the kind of content that makes a museum visit a specific occasion rather than a general one. If you have a mother in London today who would appreciate culture over brunch — and some mothers would, genuinely — the V&A is open, free, and full of extraordinary things. Happy Mother’s Day. The museums are open. The admission is free. The art is world-class. This is the deal that London makes with its visitors and residents alike: the culture is available to everyone. Use it today.
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London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
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