Science & Engineering

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.

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Royal College of Physicians Museum

Five centuries of the physicians' college - portraits, silver, instruments and the strange world of early medicine - in Lasdun's modernist building on Regent's Park, with a garden of the plants in the old pharmacopoeia.

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The Royal College of Physicians was founded by Henry VIII in 1518 to license London's doctors, and its museum keeps what the college accumulated: the portraits from Holbein's circle onward, the silver, the anatomical tables of the 1650s made from real veins and nerves pressed onto boards, William Harvey's demonstration rod, and the medicine chests and instruments of five hundred years. Denys Lasdun's building of 1964 is a historically protected masterpiece in its own right, the floating staircase in particular, and the garden outside grows the eleven hundred plants named in the college's own pharmacopoeia.

Where
11 St Andrew's Place, Fitzrovia, NW1 4LB
Nearest station
Great Portland Street · 3 min walk

Hours

Monday09:00 – 17:00
Tuesday09:00 – 17:00
Wednesday09:00 – 17:00
Thursday09:00 – 17:00
Friday09:00 – 17:00
SaturdayClosed
SundayClosed

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

Free; until 20:00 on the first Thursday of the month. Denys Lasdun's building of 1964 and the medicinal garden are part of the visit.

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

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