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The National Portrait Gallery's permanent galleries

Seven hundred years of British faces, free, and best walked downwards.

HistoryArt & designPermanentFree

In National Portrait Gallery.

The portraits run chronologically and the sensible way to take them is from the top, so go straight up and walk down. Floor 3 covers 1300 to 1850, Tudors first — the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I standing on a map of England, the only surviving contemporary likeness of Shakespeare — then the Stuarts, the Georgians and the Romantics. Floor 2 is 1850 to 2000, which is the Victorians, both world wars and everyone who made the twentieth century. Floor 1 is 2000 to now, still being added to. History Makers, on the ground floor by the entrance, is a single room of the gallery's best-known faces for people who have not got a day. The whole collection route is free; the paying exhibitions are on floors 0 and 2.

Where
National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place, WC2H 0HE
Nearest station
Charing Cross · 2 min walk

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