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The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.
The only house of Benjamin Franklin left standing anywhere, on Craven Street, where he lodged for sixteen years and where the basement was full of bones.
MuseumsGo inside
Also in Museums and The World in London.
Benjamin Franklin came to London in 1757 as the agent of Pennsylvania and lodged at 36 Craven Street, a terraced house of about 1730 behind the Strand, with his landlady Margaret Stevenson, and apart from one trip home he stayed sixteen years, until the colonies' quarrel with the Crown drove him back to Philadelphia in 1775 and into the Revolution. He wrote, experimented, invented the glass armonica and campaigned here; it is the only house he lived in that survives on either side of the Atlantic. When it was restored in 1998, before it opened as a museum on his three-hundredth birthday in 2006, the diggers found the bones of ten people under the basement floor, the remains of the anatomy school that William Hewson, Mrs Stevenson's son-in-law, ran in the house while Franklin lived upstairs. The house is shown almost bare, as a piece of theatre: an actress playing Polly Stevenson leads the Historical Experience through the rooms with sound and projection, and an architectural tour on other days tells the building's own story.
| Monday | Closed |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | Closed |
| Wednesday | Closed |
| Thursday | Closed |
| Friday | 12:00 – 17:00 |
| Saturday | 12:00 – 17:00 |
| Sunday | 12:00 – 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.