One of the world's great museums. To avoid the queues, use the 'secret' entrance on Exhibition Road.
For genuine steam enthusiasts this museum hosts Cornish engines (in their original engine housings) and rotative engines (collected from pumping stations around the country). Read more.
A 25-foot Alaskan totem pole outside the main entrance gives a clue as to what’s in here: a wealth of quirky anthropological and natural history treasures. Read more.
Predictably, weapons feature prominently in here: the 2,500 edged weapons, 200 pole arms and 1,850 firearms should keep bloodthirsty teenagers interested. Read more.
This 120-year history of consumerism, culture, design, domestic life, fashion, folly and fate, presented as a magnificently cluttered time tunnel of cartons and bottles, toys and advertising displays. Read more.
Some 25,000 exhibits accumulated by two generations of the Cuming family in the 1800s, including objects from Ancient Egypt. Read more.
Built 1756-66 for the first Earl Spencer (one of Diana’s ancestors), Spencer House is London’s finest surviving eighteenth-century private palace. Read more.
Seemingly removed from the modern world, Handel House offers much to soothe and inspire for lovers of Georgian architecture, interiors and portrait painting. Read more.
Founded by Zandra Rhodes, Bermondsey's very own celebration of the London (and international) rag trade. Read more.
Wandering among this collection of thousands of medical specimens and cases of surgical instruments is fascinating. Read more.
The bar leads to an indoor Japanese restaurant decorated in silk and charcoal. The crowd throughout looks the part too. More locals in the know than tourists clutching guidebooks. Read more.
