Museums

Cartoon Museum

British cartooning from Hogarth and Gillray to the Beano and last week's papers, on Wells Street.

Also in Art.

The political cartoon came of age in Georgian London, and the museum that collects it opened in 2006 after the cartoonist Mel Calman and a group of collectors had spent nearly twenty years raising the money; the Duke of Edinburgh, who had heard H.M. Bateman call for a national cartoon museum in 1949, cut the ribbon. Since 2019 it has been on Wells Street, north of Oxford Street, with about 250 originals on show at a time from a collection of more than four thousand: Hogarth and Gillray, the Victorian Punch men, Heath Robinson's contraptions, Giles, Steadman and Scarfe, and the comics, with Beano and Dandy pages beside the political ones. It is an independent charity with no public money, and keeps a library of five thousand books and four thousand comics upstairs for anyone who asks.

Where

63 Wells Street, W1A 3AE

Nearest station

Oxford Circus · 4 min walk

On here now

• Does My Head Look Big in This? The Art of Portrait CaricatureExhibition · Art & design · Until 1 November 2026

Hours

NearbyMuseums

• The Photographers' Gallery4 min walk
• Anaesthesia Heritage Centre6 min walk
• The Building Centre7 min walk

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