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The best museums in London, and every other one: we list them all. The great free collections, the single-room specialists, and the house museums people walk past for years. Use the filters to find yours.
London's own archive, in Clerkenwell and open to anyone who walks in: manuscripts, maps and photographs of the city from 1067 to the present day, with free exhibitions drawn from the shelves behind them.
Free
The collection opens with a charter of 1067 in which William I, a year after the Norman conquest, promised the bishop, the city's chief officer and the citizens of London that they would keep the rights they had held before he came, and it runs from there to papers filed a few years ago. Between the two are millions of manuscripts, maps, photographs and books - an eighteenth-century street plan, a Victorian workhouse register, the minutes of the councils that governed London before the present one - and the ground covered is the whole of Greater London rather than the centre alone. Anyone may walk in and use the exhibitions, the talks, the reference library and the computers with the family-history subscription sites on them; original documents are fetched up to a desk for readers holding a History Card, which is begun online and finished in person. There are also talks, tours of the conservation studio and document viewings, most at £5.
| Monday | 10:00 – 16:30 |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Wednesday | 10:00 – 19:00 |
| Thursday | 10:00 – 16:30 |
| Friday | Closed |
| Saturday | Closed |
| Sunday | Closed |
Hours from the page that lists them, checked 24 September 2026.
Also open one Saturday a month, 10:00-16:30; the dates are listed on the opening times page. Closed on Fridays, Sundays and bank holidays, and from 24 December 2026 to 3 January 2027.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.