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We've included every museum in London. Use the filters to find something for you.
A tea merchant's cabinet of the world, a famous overstuffed walrus, and gardens with the whole city laid out below them.
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Frederick Horniman sold tea. By 1891 his father's firm was the biggest tea business in the world, and the money went on collecting: masks, instruments, stuffed animals and whatever else came back from his travels, some 30,000 objects by the time he first opened his house on Christmas Eve 1890 to anyone who wanted to look. The museum he then built for them, by Charles Harrison Townsend in pale Doulting stone with a clock tower and a mosaic of Humanity in the House of Circumstance across the front, opened in 1901 and was given to the people of London.
The collection now runs to 350,000 objects in three strands. The anthropology was redisplayed in 2018 as the World Gallery; the musical instruments, one of the great collections of their kind, have had a gallery of their own since 2002; and the natural history gallery keeps its Victorian cases, with the walrus in the middle of them. Sent from Hudson Bay in 1886 to a taxidermist who had never seen a live one, it was stuffed until every fold was gone, and the museum has kept it that way. There is an aquarium in the basement. In 2022 the Horniman was named Museum of the Year, and the same year it returned seventy-two objects looted from Benin to Nigeria.
The sixteen acres of gardens opened in 1895, with a conservatory brought from the family's house in Croydon, a bandstand of 1912, a butterfly house and a garden of outdoor instruments to play. From the top of the slope the view runs north across the whole of London.
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