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Thirty places to see first, in order, for somebody who has never been to London. Each says what it is, whether it is free, whether you must book, and whether the queue is worth it.
Steam engines, the Apollo 10 capsule that flew round the Moon, and floors built for children to push and pull things. Free; the simulators and the cinema are paid.
Also in Museums and Science & Engineering.
This is Britain's national museum of science and industry, and it began as the leftovers of the Great Exhibition of 1851. The machinery nobody wanted to send home was gathered in South Kensington beside the art that became the V&A, and the two shared one museum until 1909, when the science collections were given a building and a name of their own. The present galleries on Exhibition Road opened between 1919 and 1928, and the Wellcome Wing behind them in 2000.
The ground floor tells the story of steam. The Energy Hall holds the oldest surviving James Watt beam engine and, rebuilt piece by piece, Watt's own attic workshop, sealed at his death in 1819 and moved here with its 8,300 objects when his house was pulled down in 1927. Beyond it stands the Apollo 10 command module, which orbited the Moon thirty-one times in May 1969 on the rehearsal for the landing, and Making the Modern World lines up Puffing Billy, the oldest surviving steam locomotive, Crick and Watson's model of DNA and a V-2 rocket. Stephenson's Rocket, for years the star of this floor, left for the National Railway Museum in York in 2019.
Upstairs are the newer galleries: Medicine, five rooms and more than three thousand objects, much of it from Henry Wellcome's collection; Mathematics, in a gallery shaped by Zaha Hadid's studio around a 1929 aeroplane; Information Age, where the Queen sent her first tweet at the opening in 2014; and Flight, with the Vickers Vimy in which Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic in 1919. Entry is free. Wonderlab, the hands-on gallery of live experiments, and the IMAX cinema are the parts that sell tickets.
| Monday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Wednesday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Thursday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Friday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Saturday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Sunday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
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Photo by Shadowssettle, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.