Science & Engineering

Fleming Museum

The cluttered laboratory at St Mary's where Fleming noticed the mould in 1928, put back as it was that morning.

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Alexander Fleming came back from holiday on 3 September 1928 to his small laboratory in the tower of St Mary's Hospital, sorted through the culture plates he had left stacked in the sink, and noticed one on which a mould had killed the staphylococcus around it. He named the substance penicillin, published, and could not make enough of it to matter; it took Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at Oxford, a decade later, to turn it into a drug, and the three shared the Nobel Prize in 1945. The room has been restored to the state it was in that morning, benches, glassware, the window onto Praed Street, and the museum around it, opened in 1993, tells the story with an honesty about luck the legend usually lacks: the mould was a rare strain that had drifted up from a mycologist's laboratory downstairs, the plate had been left uncovered, and the weather had been right.

Where

Praed Street, Paddington, W2 1NY

Nearest station

Paddington · 3 min walk

Hours

Hours from the page that lists them, checked 5 September 2026.

Free; other weekday times by appointment with the archivist. Up stairs, in the original 1928 room.

NearbyScience & Engineering

• Paddington station4 min walk
• Edward Jenner statue10 min walk
• Alan Turing's birthplace, Warrington Crescent14 min walk

NearbyOther Categories

• Lindo Wing, St Mary's HospitalRoyal London1 min walk
• GoBoat PaddingtonWhat’s On2 min walk
• Market Halls PaddingtonFood Markets3 min walk

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