London gives away more world-class museum than any city on earth, and the small free ones are frequently better than the enormous free ones. Here are 39 that cost nothing in September 2026, including a Georgian surgeon’s specimen collection, a working sewing machine museum that opens one Saturday a month, and a Roman temple seven metres under a bank.
The free national museums are the obvious half of this: the British Museum, the V&A, the Natural History Museum, both Tates, the National Gallery. Everyone knows. Everyone also does them wrong, by attempting two in an afternoon.
The better half is the twenty-odd small ones, most of which have no queue, no cloakroom and no gift shop worth the name, and several of which are the best hour in their postcode. This list is sorted so you can find both.
Quick answers
What is the best free museum in London? Sir John Soane’s, and it is not close. A Georgian architect’s house left exactly as he arranged it, with a sarcophagus in the basement and paintings on walls that unfold.
Which is best with children? The Natural History Museum for the big set pieces, Young V&A in Bethnal Green for anyone under about ten, and the Horniman for the gardens as much as the galleries.
Do I need to book? Only the Science Museum, which asks for a free ticket. Everywhere else is walk-in, though booking ahead helps at the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.
What is closed right now? The Museum of London, which becomes the London Museum at Smithfield and opens on 28 November 2026. RIBA at Portland Place, shut until around 2028. The Horniman’s natural history gallery, including the walrus, until 2027.
Which of these is genuinely quiet? The Wallace Collection, the Grant Museum, Burgh House and the Museum of Freemasonry. All four are within a few minutes of somewhere with a queue.
The big free museums
The British Museum
Eight million objects, of which about eighty thousand are out, and a collection whose acquisition history is an argument the museum now runs towards rather than away from. The Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures, the Sutton Hoo helmet, the Lewis chessmen.
Pick three rooms and go straight to them, then leave. Ours are 4 for the Egyptian sculpture, 41 for Sutton Hoo and 24 for the Living and Dying case, which is 14,000 pills laid out as the medication two people take across a lifetime and the most quietly devastating thing in the building. Trying to see it all is how people end up remembering nothing.
Friday is the late, to 8.30pm, and the last two hours are the emptiest the Great Court gets.
Where: Great Russell Street, WC1B 3DG. Free, booking advised. Daily 10am to 5pm, Friday to 8.30pm. The Bayeux Tapestry arrives this month, which will change the queue considerably.
The Victoria and Albert Museum
The world’s largest museum of applied arts: cast courts holding a full-size plaster Trajan’s Column in two pieces, the Raphael Cartoons, four floors of ceramics, and a jewellery gallery people queue inside the building to enter.
Go on a Friday evening when it stays open to 10pm. The Cast Courts after dark, half-lit and empty, are the best room in South Kensington and on a Saturday afternoon you cannot move in them.
Where: Cromwell Road, SW7 2RL. Free, no booking. Daily 10am to 5.45pm, Friday to 10pm.
The Natural History Museum
Waterhouse’s terracotta cathedral to the natural world, with Hope the blue whale hanging in Hintze Hall and animals carved into every arch in the building. The architecture is as good as the collection.
Be there for opening at ten and go up the main staircase first. The view down onto the whale from the first landing is the shot, and by eleven the staircase is three deep. The Evolution Garden outside is free, ticketless and almost always empty.
Note it closes for the day on Friday 9 October 2026 for a gala.
Where: Cromwell Road, SW7 5BD. Free, ticket advised but walk-up works. Daily 10am to 5.50pm. More of the neighbourhood in our Kensington guide.
The Science Museum
Stephenson’s Rocket, the Apollo 10 command module that actually went round the Moon, Babbage’s Difference Engine and a hall of working steam machinery.
Go up to Apollo 10 before the school groups reach it. The Space gallery has moved to level 0 while new galleries are built, so use the lifts or stairs marked C rather than wandering the upper floors looking for it. Expect some construction noise.
This is the one museum on the list that asks you to book a free ticket in advance.
Where: Exhibition Road, SW7 2DD. Free with a booked ticket. Daily 10am to 6pm.
The Imperial War Museum
Not a celebration of war but a study of it, and the Holocaust Galleries on floors three and four are among the most carefully made museum spaces in Britain.
Do the Holocaust Galleries first, in the morning, and give them ninety minutes. Doing them at the end of a day with everything else already in your head is a mistake we have watched people make. Then go down through the First World War galleries with something left.
Where: Lambeth Road, SE1 6HZ. Free, no booking. Daily 10am to 6pm. It is one of the best free things to do in London.
The National Maritime Museum
The largest maritime collection in the world, with Nelson’s Trafalgar coat, bullet hole and all, and Turner’s Battle of Trafalgar filling an entire wall.
Do this and the Queen’s House in one go, as one building. They are two minutes apart, both free, and most people do one and go home. The Cove, the new play space, is the reason to bring small children to Greenwich at all.
Where: Romney Road, SE10 9NF. Free. Daily 10am to 5pm. Build a day round it with our Painted Hall guide and the Greenwich foot tunnel.
The Queen’s House
Inigo Jones’s 1616 villa, the first classical building in Britain, holding the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I and the Tulip Stairs, the first geometric self-supporting spiral staircase built here.
Stand at the bottom of the Tulip Stairs and shoot straight up. Check the closure list before travelling, though: the stairs shut for private events on published dates, sometimes from late morning, and there is nothing worse than getting to Greenwich to find them roped off.
Where: Romney Road, SE10 9NF. Free, booking advised. Daily 10am to 5pm.
The British Library
Magna Carta, the Lindisfarne Gospels, Leonardo’s notebook, Handel’s Messiah in his own hand and Beatles lyrics on the back of an envelope, all in one free room.
Go into the Treasures Gallery and nothing else, then sit under the King’s Library tower with a coffee. Twenty minutes of the best objects in Britain and a room worth an hour on its own. If you have an actual research need, apply for a Reader Pass in person at the registration desk, which is now the only way since the 2023 cyber attack.
Where: 96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB. Free. Treasures Gallery daily. More of the area in our King’s Cross guide.
Tate Modern
A power station full of twentieth and twenty-first century art, with the Turbine Hall commissions as the headline and a permanent collection that is free in its entirety.
Skip the ticketed show and go straight to level 4 in the Blavatnik building for the view. It is free, it is a better view than the paid viewing platforms across the river, and it puts St Paul’s straight down the axis of the Millennium Bridge.
Where: Bankside, SE1 9TG. Free. Daily 10am to 6pm, Friday and Saturday to 9pm. The level 10 viewing platform is open again too.
Tate Britain
Five hundred years of British art in chronological order, plus the largest Turner collection anywhere, and it is consistently emptier than its younger sister at Bankside.
Use the Manton entrance on Atterbury Street, not the Millbank steps — the main entrance is closed until 2027 for the Clore Garden works and people are still walking up to a shut door. Once inside, the Rotunda staircase and the tiled floor under the dome are the shots.
Where: Millbank, SW1P 4RG. Free. Daily 10am to 6pm.
The National Gallery
Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Turner’s Fighting Temeraire. Two thousand three hundred paintings, all free.
Come in through the Sainsbury Wing, which is now the main entrance, and start in the earliest rooms. Everybody walks straight to the Impressionists and finds them full; the fifteenth-century rooms at the far end are usually near empty and hold the best painting in the building. Building work continues, so expect a few rooms shut.
Where: Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN. Free. Daily 10am to 6pm, Friday to 9pm. There is more around the square in our Trafalgar Square guide.
The National Portrait Gallery
Reopened in June 2023 after a three-year rebuild that turned a dark warren into one of the best-lit galleries in the country, and it now hangs its Tudors at the top and works down.
Start on the top floor and go down. The Tudor rooms are the strongest and the escalators deliver everyone to the middle, so going straight up and working down means you see the best of it first and against the flow. Some rooms are closed for changes into October.
Where: St Martin’s Place, WC2H 0HE. Free. Daily 10.30am to 6pm, Friday and Saturday to 9pm.
The small ones, which are frequently better
Sir John Soane’s Museum
The architect’s own house, left by act of Parliament exactly as it stood at his death in 1837, crammed with antiquities, models and paintings, including the sarcophagus of Seti I in the basement and a picture room whose walls open outwards to reveal more walls.
Go on a Wednesday, Friday or Sunday at 2pm for the free tour of the private apartments. It takes eight people, first come first served, it costs nothing and it is the best free thing in London. Get there fifteen minutes early and wait.
Where: 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, WC2A 3BP. Free. Wednesday to Sunday 10am to 5pm. It tops our list of London’s hidden gems.
The Hunterian Museum
John Hunter’s eighteenth-century anatomical collection at the Royal College of Surgeons, reopened in 2023 after six years shut and completely reinterpreted. Thousands of specimens in glass, arranged as an argument about how the body was understood.
Pair it with Soane’s, which is on the other side of the same square. Two collections assembled by two Georgians in the same decade, one of art and one of anatomy, ten minutes apart and both free. It is the best free double in London and almost nobody does it.
Where: 38-43 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, WC2A 3PE. Free. Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm.
The Wallace Collection
A Marylebone townhouse full of Fragonard, Titian, Rembrandt, Velazquez and Europe’s finest collection of arms and armour, left to the nation on condition nothing ever leaves it. Which means nothing does.
Sit in front of The Swing for ten minutes and then go and look at the armoury. Two minutes from Oxford Street and reliably empty while Selfridges is heaving, which is the single strangest fact about central London.
Where: Hertford House, Manchester Square, W1U 3BN. Free. Daily 10am to 5pm. More of the neighbourhood in our Marylebone guide.
The London Mithraeum
A third-century temple to Mithras, seven metres under Bloomberg’s European headquarters, reassembled where it was found in 1954. Haze, chanting and lights coming up on the walls, done far better than it sounds.
Book the free ticket even though you do not have to. Access to the temple runs in twenty-minute slots and walk-up is not guaranteed. Upstairs, find the wooden writing tablet carrying the earliest known reference to London and the earliest financial document from Britain.
Where: 12 Walbrook, EC4N 8AA. Free, booking encouraged. Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 6pm, Sunday from noon, closed Mondays. We have a longer piece on the London Mithraeum.
The Wellcome Collection
A museum about what it means to be human, built out of Henry Wellcome’s collection of medical objects, with a free library above it that is one of the nicest rooms in NW1.
Be clear about what is left before you go: Medicine Man and Medicine Now closed permanently in 2022 and Being Human is the only permanent gallery now. The temporary shows carry the place, and they are free. Go for The Coming of Age, on until 29 November.
Where: 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE. Free. Tuesday to Sunday 10am to 6pm, closed Mondays. There is a fuller write-up of the Wellcome Collection.
Young V&A
The old V&A Museum of Childhood, reopened in 2023 under a new name and completely rebuilt around three galleries: Imagine, Play and Design. It won Museum of the Year and it deserved to.
Take anyone under ten and let them run. Unlike almost every other museum in this list, touching things is the point rather than the problem, and the design gallery is genuinely interesting for the adult who came along.
Where: Cambridge Heath Road, E2 9PA. Free, no booking. Daily 10am to 5.45pm.
The Museum of the Home
Eleven restored almshouses on Kingsland Road, laid out as the Rooms Through Time: eleven British domestic interiors from 1630 to the present, each one a complete room you look into.
Do the Rooms Through Time in order and then go out to the gardens behind. There are period gardens matching the rooms, they are free, and most visitors never work out they are there. Free drop-in tours of Almshouse 14 run on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Where: 136 Kingsland Road, E2 8EA. Free. Tuesday to Sunday 10am to 5pm.
The Horniman Museum
A Victorian tea trader’s collection given to the public, with 1,300 musical instruments, sixteen acres of gardens and a view back over the whole city.
Come for the gardens and the music gallery, and know that the walrus is not there. The natural history gallery is closed until 2027 for the Nature+Love project and the over-stuffed walrus is off display for all of 2026. Go up to the terrace in the morning instead, which is one of the best free views in south London.
Where: 100 London Road, SE23 3PQ. Free; aquarium and butterfly house ticketed. Daily 10am to 5.30pm. More on the Horniman and its collection.
The Design Museum
The old Commonwealth Institute, gutted and rebuilt by John Pawson under its hyperbolic paraboloid roof, and the only museum in Britain devoted entirely to contemporary design.
The free half is Designer Maker User on level 2, and it is the better half. Only pay for a temporary show if the subject genuinely interests you; the permanent collection is a proper hour and costs nothing, and the building is worth the trip regardless.
Where: 224-238 Kensington High Street, W8 6AG. Permanent collection free, exhibitions ticketed. Daily 10am to 6pm. It also makes our Kensington guide.
The National Army Museum
Four hundred years of the British Army told through objects and, unusually, through the argument about what the army was doing. Next door to the Royal Hospital Chelsea.
Everything here is free, including the temporary exhibitions, which is rarer than it sounds — most of the big free museums charge for their headline shows. Closed Mondays.
Where: Royal Hospital Road, SW3 4HT. Free. Tuesday to Sunday 10am to 5.30pm.
The RAF Museum
Six hangars in Colindale holding more than a hundred aircraft, from a Sopwith Camel to a Lancaster, a Vulcan and a Harrier, on the site of the old Hendon aerodrome.
Take the Northern line, because the parking is £8.50 to £11 and the museum itself is free. Start in Hangar 1 with the First World War aircraft, which is the collection’s real strength and the half most people rush.
Where: Grahame Park Way, NW9 5LL. Free. Daily 10am to 5pm.
London Museum Docklands
A Georgian sugar warehouse on West India Quay telling the story of the river, the docks and the trade that built them, including the London, Sugar and Slavery gallery.
Give the London, Sugar and Slavery gallery the time it needs rather than treating it as one room of several. It is the most serious permanent gallery on this subject in the country and it is in the building the trade paid for, which is the entire point.
Where: No.1 Warehouse, West India Quay, E14 4AL. Free. Daily 10am to 5pm.
The Bank of England Museum
Inside the Bank itself, on Bartholomew Lane, with a Roman mosaic found on the site, a gold bar you can pick up, and a rather good account of how the institution got things wrong as well as right.
Come to a Late, on every third Thursday to 8pm. The museum is otherwise Monday to Friday only and shut at weekends, which makes it almost impossible for anyone visiting London for a long weekend. Lift the gold bar: it weighs 13 kilos and everyone underestimates it.
Where: Bartholomew Lane, EC2R 8AH. Free. Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm.
The Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology
Eighty thousand objects in cases so tightly packed that UCL hands you a torch at the door. It is the everyday material Flinders Petrie dug up rather than the funerary treasure: tools, pottery, a beaded dress from around 2400 BC.
Take the torch and use it, and go in the afternoon because it only opens 1pm to 5pm. The Tuesday to Saturday afternoon window is the thing that catches everyone, and the museum is ten minutes from the British Museum for a very different version of Egypt.
Where: Malet Place, WC1E 6BT. Free. Tuesday to Saturday 1pm to 5pm.
The Grant Museum of Zoology
The last university zoological museum in London: 68,000 specimens in a single Victorian room, including a quagga skeleton, a dodo bone and the jar of moles.
The jar of moles is the whole museum in one object — eighteen of them, pickled, stacked. Download the free thirty-minute audio tour at the door, which takes you round ten objects and is far better than wandering. Afternoons only, Tuesday to Saturday.
Where: 21 University Street, WC1E 6DE. Free. Tuesday to Saturday 1pm to 5pm.
Burgh House and Hampstead Museum
A 1704 house in the middle of Hampstead with the local museum inside it, a good cafe in the basement and a walled garden behind.
Go on a Sunday and have lunch in the buttery. It opens Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday and is closed on Saturdays, which is exactly the wrong way round for most visitors and exactly why it is quiet.
Where: New End Square, NW3 1LT. Free. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday 10am to 4pm.
Queer Britain
The UK’s first national LGBTQ+ museum, opened in 2022 in a former goods yard building behind King’s Cross, running four gallery spaces of changing exhibitions.
It runs on pay-what-you-can rather than a fixed free entry, so pay something if you can. It is a young museum on precarious funding, the shows change often enough to be worth returning to, and it is a ten-minute walk from the British Library if you want to make a day of King’s Cross.
Where: 2 Granary Square, N1C 4BH. Pay what you can. Wednesday to Sunday noon to 6pm. We were there when Queer Britain opened.
The Vagina Museum
The world’s first bricks-and-mortar museum dedicated to gynaecological anatomy, now settled in two railway arches in Bethnal Green after a couple of moves, doing genuinely good public health exhibitions with an unrepentant sense of humour.
Book a free slot and give a fiver at the door. Current shows include Menopause: What’s Changed?, which is the kind of thing no national museum in this country has ever bothered to mount.
Where: Arches 275-276, Poyser Street, E2 9RF. Free with a suggested £5 donation. Wednesday to Sunday noon to 7pm. We wrote up a visit to the Vagina Museum in full.
The Faraday Museum
In the basement of the Royal Institution on Albemarle Street, built around Michael Faraday’s actual magnetic laboratory, preserved as he left it.
Go down to the lower ground floor first and stand in the laboratory. Ten of the chemical elements were discovered in this building and the electric motor was invented in that room, which is a lot for a basement off Piccadilly that takes twenty minutes to see.
Where: 21 Albemarle Street, W1S 4BS. Free. Weekdays.
The Museum of Freemasonry
Inside the art deco bulk of Freemasons’ Hall on Great Queen Street, holding the largest collection of Masonic material in the world: regalia, jewels, ceramics and a great deal of very strange furniture.
The museum is free but the building tours are not, so budget for both or neither. The Grand Temple is the reason to pay, and if you have seen Kingsman or Spooks you have already seen the corridors. Tuesday to Saturday.
Where: Freemasons’ Hall, 60 Great Queen Street, WC2B 5AZ. Museum free, tours ticketed. Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm. It is in our Covent Garden guide, and there is a second masonic temple hidden in a hotel nearby.
The Royal Academy of Music Museum
Three floors in the Academy’s Marylebone Road building holding Cremonese violins, including instruments by Stradivari and Guarneri, and a workshop where you can watch them being restored.
It is Fridays only now, 11am to 6pm, which is a serious cut from what it used to be. Time it with a free student recital in the building and you have a very good free Friday afternoon.
Where: Marylebone Road, NW1 5HT. Free. Fridays only, 11am to 6pm.
The Museum of Anaesthesia
A single-room collection at the Association of Anaesthetists on Portland Place, tracing the shift from a world where surgery meant being held down to one where it does not. Ether inhalers, chloroform bottles, early machines.
It is open weekdays without an appointment, which is not what most listings tell you. Twenty minutes, free, and the John Snow material alone justifies the walk up Portland Place.
Where: 21 Portland Place, W1B 1PY. Free. Monday to Friday 10am to 4pm, last admission 3.30pm.
The London Sewing Machine Museum
Above a sewing machine shop on Balham High Road, six hundred machines collected over decades, including the machine given to Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter as a wedding present.
It opens on the first Saturday of the month, 2pm to 5pm, and that is it. The 2026 dates left are 3 October, 7 November and 5 December, then it closes until 6 February. Put one in the diary now, because turning up on the wrong Saturday is the only way to visit this place and most people manage it.
Where: 308 Balham High Road, SW17 7AA. Free. First Saturday of the month, 2pm to 5pm.
Free galleries
The Guildhall Art Gallery
The City of London’s own collection, heavy on Victorian narrative painting and Pre-Raphaelites, with the remains of London’s Roman amphitheatre in the basement underneath it.
Take the free introductory tour at 12.15pm or 1.15pm, Tuesday to Sunday. It is twenty minutes, it costs nothing, and it is the difference between looking at the amphitheatre and understanding what you are standing in. Closed 13 to 16 November.
Where: Guildhall Yard, EC2V 5AE. Free. Tuesday to Sunday. More around it in our Farringdon guide.
The Serpentine Galleries
Two free contemporary art galleries in Kensington Gardens, ten minutes apart across the bridge, plus the annual Pavilion: a temporary building commissioned each summer from an architect who has never built in England.
Come between June and October for the Pavilion, which is the reason to make the trip. Out of season the two galleries are a good twenty minutes rather than an afternoon, and they are always free.
Where: Kensington Gardens, W2 3XA and W2 2AR. Free. Tuesday to Sunday 10am to 6pm.
Soho Photography Quarter
The Photographers’ Gallery pushed its programme out onto the streets around Ramillies Place: large-scale work on the walls of a Soho backstreet, changing a few times a year, free by definition because it is outdoors.
Go after dark. It is lit, it is empty, and the work reads far better against a black Soho backstreet than against a grey afternoon. Currently showing NINAGAWA Mika’s Captive Blooms, up until June 2027.
Where: Ramillies Place and around, W1F. Free, always there. There is more of the area in our Soho guide.
The Whitechapel Gallery
The gallery that showed Guernica in 1939 and gave Pollock, Rothko and Kahlo their first British outings, and is still commissioning artists nobody has heard of yet.
One caveat: it is no longer entirely free. The seasonal displays are, but there is now one ticketed exhibition a season at £16.50. The way round it is Whitechapel Lates on Thursdays, 6pm to 9pm, which are pay-what-you-can for everything.
Where: 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX. Displays free, one show ticketed. Tuesday to Sunday 11am to 6pm, Thursday to 9pm. It is a ten-minute walk from Brick Lane.
Two things to know before you go
The London Museum opens on 28 November 2026. The old Museum of London closed at London Wall at the end of 2022 and the collection has been out of public view since. Its new home in the Smithfield General Market building will be free, and there is a six-metre window looking straight onto a live Thameslink line running past the galleries, which is a world first. It is not open yet, so there is nothing to visit before the end of November.
Two things that used to be on this list are not any more. RIBA at 66 Portland Place closed to the public in June 2025 for a three-year rebuild and will not reopen until around 2028. The Museum of Brands in Notting Hill now charges £14, though from January 2026 that ticket buys unlimited returns for a year, which makes it good value if you live nearby.
The London x London Take
The mistake with free museums is treating free as a reason to do more of them. Two a day, ninety minutes each, is the limit at which any of it stays in your head.
If you do one thing off this list, do the free apartments tour at Soane’s on a Wednesday afternoon and then walk across Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the Hunterian. Two Georgian collections, one of art and one of anatomy, assembled in the same decade a hundred metres apart, and both of them free. Nothing on the tourist trail comes close, and on a Wednesday you will queue for neither.
More free London in our guides to free things to do in London, the city’s hidden gems and the best London gardens.
