Museums

We've included every museum in London. Use the filters to find something for you.

Tell us what we can do better, or what you’re trying to discover.

Valence House Museum

The last of Dagenham's five manor houses, timber-framed and half-moated, with the borough's story inside, free.

Photo by Gordon Joly, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Valence House is the only one of Dagenham's five manor houses still standing, a timber-framed house with a moat round two sides of it, named after the Valence family who held it in the thirteenth century. It has been a manor, a family home, the council's town hall and the headquarters of its libraries, and since a refurbishment finished in 2010 it has been the museum of Barking and Dagenham. The portraits are the surprise: the Fanshawes, the family that held Parsloes and Barking for three centuries, left a run of them from the 1600s onwards, one of the best sets of family pictures in any local museum. The rest is the borough: Barking's fishing fleet, the Ford works at Dagenham, and the Becontree estate, the largest public housing estate in the world when the London County Council built some 26,000 homes here between 1921 and 1935, told with the residents' own things. There is a herb garden beside the house, and entry is free.

Where
Becontree Avenue, Becontree Heath, RM8 3HT
Nearest station
Chadwell Heath · 14 min walk

NearbyMuseums

Submit a correction for this listing.

Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

Which area are you in?