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We've included every museum in London. Use the filters to find something for you.
The port's story in a Georgian sugar warehouse at West India Quay, free, with the gallery on London and the slave trade that the docks were built on.
Free
Also in Power & Politics.
The West India Docks opened in 1802 as the first enclosed docks in London, cut across the Isle of Dogs to unload the sugar, rum and coffee of the Caribbean behind a wall that thieves could not cross, and No. 1 Warehouse on the north quay, built the same year to hold the sugar, is one of the last of the docks' buildings left standing. The museum took it in 2003 with the collections of the Port of London Authority and tells two thousand years of the river on five floors: Roman quays, the medieval port, the whaling and the tea clippers, the docks at their height, the Blitz that burned them, and their closure in the 1980s before the towers of Canary Wharf rose over the water. Sailortown recreates a Wapping alley of the 1840s in the dark, with its pub and its lodging houses, and Mudlarks is a gallery for small children to play in. The gallery that matters most is London, Sugar and Slavery, which lays out plainly that the docks, the warehouse and much of the city's wealth were built on the labour of enslaved Africans, in the building where the sugar came in. Entry is free.
Step-free access
| Monday | 10:00 – 17:00 |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 10:00 – 17:00 |
| Wednesday | 10:00 – 17:00 |
| Thursday | 10:00 – 17:00 |
| Friday | 10:00 – 17:00 |
| Saturday | 10:00 – 17:00 |
| Sunday | 10:00 – 17:00 |
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.