Fiona MacLeod’s guide to the world-class institutions you can enter for nothing
LONDON, UK – London has more world-class free museums than any other city on earth, a situation that visitors, when told that the British Museum, the National Gallery, the V&A, the Natural History Museum, and the Tate Modern are all free to enter, typically react to with disbelief. Fiona MacLeod covers London travel for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, and this is her guide to the seven that deserve a full day each.
The British Museum, Bloomsbury
The British Museum contains approximately eight million objects, of which around 80,000 are on display at any time. The Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles, the Lewis Chessmen, the Sutton Hoo helmet: these are not descriptions of objects in a guidebook but the objects themselves, in rooms you can enter for free on any day of the week. The museum is open daily until 17:30 and until 20:30 on Fridays. The Great Court, the Norman Foster-designed glass-roofed atrium, is the largest covered public square in Europe and is where you should begin, if only to orient yourself in a building that is very large and can be confusing without a plan. Go early on weekdays. The Elgin Marbles room is manageable at nine in the morning and crowded beyond comfort by eleven. The museum’s website at britishmuseum.org has a room-by-room guide useful for planning a focused visit.
The Natural History Museum, South Kensington
The Natural History Museum is the building that children need to see in London: the blue whale skeleton in the Hintze Hall, the dinosaur skeletons, the earthquake simulator in the Earth Galleries, and the Darwin Centre, where the scientific collection is stored and where you can watch the work of taxonomy continuing in real time. The building itself is remarkable, an Alfred Waterhouse Victorian Gothic cathedral to natural science that is worth visiting for the architecture alone. It is very busy at weekends and school holiday periods; midweek morning visits are significantly more comfortable. The museum’s website at nhm.ac.uk provides timed entry booking for the most popular galleries, which is free but recommended.
The V&A, South Kensington
The Victoria and Albert Museum contains the world’s largest collection of decorative arts and design: ceramics, textiles, fashion, jewellery, furniture, metalwork, photography, and performance from every culture and period. The Cast Courts, which contain full-scale plaster casts of major European sculptural works including a replica of Michelangelo’s David and a cast of Trajan’s Column split across two floors, are genuinely astonishing and are not on most visitors’ itineraries, which makes them even better. The Fashion galleries are exceptional. The South Asian galleries are among the finest in the world. The V&A’s cafe is good. The garden in summer is peaceful in a way that few Central London spaces achieve.
Tate Modern and the National Gallery
The Tate Modern occupies the former Bankside Power Station and contains the national collection of international modern and contemporary art from 1900 to the present. The Turbine Hall hosts large-scale commissioned works that rotate and are often the most talked-about thing in London when they open. Entry to the permanent collection is free; major ticketed exhibitions are not. The gallery at tate.org.uk has booking information. The National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, free to enter, holds one of the greatest collections of Western European painting in the world, including Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Monet, Van Gogh, and Seurat. It is an hour’s walk from the Tate, or a ten-minute Tube ride, or a lovely walk along the South Bank to Waterloo and then across the bridge. For London museum information, see Visit London.
Three additional free museums that deserve mention beyond the seven above. The Museum of London Docklands, which moved from its Barbican location to a new site and documents the history of London’s river trade and East End communities, is genuinely excellent and genuinely undervisited. The Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House contains one of the finest collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world, including Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, in rooms that are never as crowded as the National Gallery. The free admission was restored after a temporary ticketed period. The Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is the preserved house of the architect who designed the Bank of England, containing his collection of antiquities, paintings, and architectural drawings in rooms that are filled to the point of being overwhelming. It is open Tuesday through Saturday and is one of the most unusual spaces in London. All three are free. None of them are on the standard itinerary. All of them should be. For more on London’s cultural offer, see Visit London.
Planning Your Museum Day
The practical advice for museum visiting in London that most guides omit is about pacing. The British Museum, the V&A, and the Natural History Museum are each large enough that attempting to see them comprehensively in a single visit produces a kind of exhaustion that renders the final hour of visiting useless. Fiona MacLeod recommends selecting two or three rooms or collections to see carefully rather than attempting the whole museum quickly. The British Museum’s Room 4, which contains the Rosetta Stone and early Egyptian material, and Room 41, which contains the Lewis Chessmen, are more rewarding when seen with full attention than the whole ground floor seen at pace. The V&A’s Cast Courts and the Jewellery Gallery, seen in sequence with a coffee in the garden between, constitute a complete and satisfying visit of about three hours. Permission to leave a free museum before seeing everything is something that most visitors need to be given explicitly. Fiona MacLeod gives it now. For more on London’s cultural offer, see Visit London.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
