Top 5 Best Museums in London

The Natural History Museum is one of the most iconic museums in London. Located on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, it’s one of three major museums on this street. The building houses over 80 million individual items covering five categories: botany, mineralogy, zoology, paleontology, and entomology. The museum’s most famous area, Hintze Hall, once housed a plaster cast of a complete Diplodocus dinosaur skeleton and is now home to a complete blue whale skeleton. Visitors can take a walk through the history of the animal kingdom and human evolution, and with extensive exhibitions and specimens, visitors can spend a full and exciting day here.

By far the largest museum of applied and decorative arts and design in the country, the Victoria and Albert Museum (known as the V&A) is a must-see for those with an interest in all things art and fashion. The vast collection of artefacts covers a series of categories including ‘Asia’, ‘Furniture, Textiles and Fashion’, ‘Sculpture, Metalwork, Ceramics & Glass’, and ‘Word & Image’. The museum is the proud host of the world’s largest collection of post-classical sculpture, with the most Italian Renaissance pieces outside Italy. With such a vast collection of artefacts, you can spend countless hours exploring the museum. Alongside the permanent exhibitions, the V&A also houses a range of ever-changing unique exhibits.

Located in Bloomsbury, the British Museum was the first public national museum in the world and is arguably the largest of its kind. Opened to the public in 1759 it quickly gathered a large and comprehensive collection of artefacts from around the world. The museum has up to eight million artefacts with only 80,000 ever on show at one time. The British Museum’s many departments include: ‘Ancient Egypt and Sudan’, ‘Greece and Rome’, ‘Middle East’, ‘Britain, Europe, and Prehistory’, ‘Coins and Medals’, and ‘Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas’. This museum is a history buffs dream and spending the day here will leave visitors with a wider understanding of humanity’s cultural history.

There are few more iconic symbols of London than the red double-decker bus or the black Hackney Carriage taxicab. A visit to the London Transport Museum will delight visitors with examples of steam engines from the early days of rail power, early red buses, and the famous black cab. The museum, which is in the Covent Garden piazza, has been open for decades and welcomes thousands through its front doors. This museum is especially for those with an interest in transportation, but also for those ‘out-of-towners’ who wish to sample something that is quintessentially London and British.