London's top 10 unusual museums
- greaterlondon
- Apr 27, 2015
- 7 min read
Instead of making straight for the V&A or National Gallery, head off the beaten track to one of London's more unusual museums, where you'll find Victorian bone shears, 100 year-old Oxo cubes and the world's most famous couch...

With its grisly collection of surgical instruments – we can easily imagine cranial drills, skin-grafting scissors and amputation saws lying around Frankenstein’s laboratory – The Old Operating Theatre would test the stomach of most medical students. The attic theatre of St Thomas’ Hospital was unearthed in 1956 after being abandoned in the hospital’s 1862 relocation. Used to operate on female patients, surgery until 1846 was limited to swift procedures (amputations took good surgeons less than a minute, the patient ‘put under’ with either alcohol or opiates) as antiseptic surgery had not yet been invented. Plan your visit to coincide with the weekly Victorian surgery demonstration (Saturdays at 2pm) by the museum’s enthusiastic staff, who’ll speak in gory detail about 19th-century surgical practice (think doctors wearing frock coats stained with blood and pus) before hacking off a leg in a mock amputation.
Essential information
Opening times: Monday-Sunday, 10.30am-5pm. Tickets: adult, £6.50, child (under 16), £3.50, family (valid for up to two adults and four children from the same family), £13.90.
For more information, visit LINK or call 020 7188 2679.

If you’ve ever scratched your head over what Oxo cubes looked like in the Great War, the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising is where you’ll find your answer. Split into decades, stretching from Victorian times to the present day, this quirky museum has over 12,000 relics of British consumer culture, from the aforementioned Oxo cubes and wartime ration books to Rimmel cosmetics dating from the 1890s, 50s and 60s board games like Milton Bradley’s Beat the Clock and The Great Marvello and an impressive range of tinned custard powders.
Essential information
Opening times: Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-6pm; Sunday, 11am-5pm. Tickets: adult, £6.50, child (7-16), £2.25, family, £15. For more information, visit LINK or call 020 7908 0880.

Ever get the urge to poke your nose into neighbours’ living rooms and note how their furniture's arranged? We’re not here to judge, but instead of irritating the folk next door, we urge you to visit the Geffrye Museum’s 11 period rooms. Arranged chronologically, from an oak-panelled hall in 1630 to a 1998 loft apartment, they exhibit (in fascinating detail) how the living quarters of the English middle classes have been used and furnished in the last 400 years. Even if you don’t subscribe to ‘Elle Decoration’, you’ll be intrigued to learn how the 1830 drawing room’s wooden furniture has been stained and painted to appear more expensive and that its polished chessboard doubles as a needlework table. Flash-forward to 1965 and the Royal Star television set has replaced a fireplace as the living room’s focus and Danish design influence is already evident (you think Scandi just became chic?) by the Fritz Hansen coffee table. Don’t miss out on the museum’s period gardens, which have been planted according to drawings, prints, maps and planting lists from the 17th century (the Tudor knot garden’s design, for example, is based on a parquetry motif on the oak livery cupboard in the 1630 hall).
Essential information
Opening times: Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-5pm. Free admission. For more information, visit LINK or call 020 7739 9893.

As the father of psychoanalysis (in a nutshell: free association, Oedipus Complex, repression and the unconscious), Sigmund Freud might be NW3’s most intriguing past resident. Fleeing the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Freud decamped to the red-brick house at 20 Maresfield Gardens, which remained in the family until his youngest daughter Anna’s death in 1982. Now a museum, its study contains over 2,000 of Freud’s possessions, from the humdrum paraphernalia of everyday life – his specs, umbrella and wedding ring – to his collection of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Oriental antiquities and extensive library. His famous couch (left), where patients would lie for their sessions, remains as he left it in 1939, covered in an Iranian rug and made comfortable with chenille cushions. If only sofas could talk…
Essential information
Opening hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 12pm-5pm. Tickets: adult, £6, child (under 12), free. For more information, visit LINK or call 020 7435 2002.
Fans have a far more complex history than your average accessory. Instead of simply hanging from a lady’s wrist and being deployed when she wished to appear coquettish (as you might assume from watching ‘Marie Antoinette’), fans date back to 3,000BC when the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans used them for cooling and ceremonial purposes. The Fan Museum in Greenwich, set over a lovingly restored pair of Grade II listed buildings erected in 1721, houses more than 4,000 from all corners of the globe. Dating from the 11th century, most are antique (you could spend hours marvelling at their painted leaves and mother of pearl sticks) yet in mint condition. We heartily recommend visiting on Tuesday, Saturday or Sunday so you can take afternoon tea in the sun-soaked orangery (left) and booking a place on the museum’s fan-making workshop held on the first Saturday of every month.
Essential information
Opening times: Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm; Sunday, 12pm-5pm. Tickets: adult, £4, child (under 7), free, family (two adults and two children), £10. For more information and to book afternoon tea or the fan-making workshop, visit LINK or call 020 8305 1441.

The Garden Museum was founded in 1977 to rescue the abandoned church of St Mary’s from demolition. John Tradescant, an English gardener and naturalist, was buried at St Mary’s in 1638 and the church’s knot garden and lush surrounds have been painstakingly planted with species the Tradescants (elder and younger) introduced, such as the scarlet runner bean, red maple and tulip tree. The church itself houses three exhibitions for the green-fingered each year. Its current installation (until 27 April) puts the relationship between fashion design and British gardens under the microscope, featuring pieces from Valentino, Alexander McQueen, Philip Treacy and YSL. (Best leave your wellies and wheelbarrows at home.)
Essential information
Opening times: Sunday-Friday, 10.30am-5pm; Saturday, 10.30am-4pm. Tickets to permanent exhibition, garden and temporary exhibition: adult, £7.50, student, £3. For more information, visit LINK or call 020 7401 8865.

Anyone who’s read ‘Jane Eyre’ will be intrigued by The Ragged School Museum. Housed in three canalside buildings which together once formed London’s largest ‘ragged’ (free) school to educate the East End’s impoverished, the museum offers visitors a rare glimpse into a Lowood-like institution. The museum runs a Victorian lesson (complete with a cane-wielding schoolmistress, wooden desks with inkwells and a dunce's hat) on the first Sunday of every month (6 April, 2.15pm-3.30pm), where as pupils you'll be taught reciting, drawing and writing on slates. (The classroom is limited to 34 people per session so booking is advisable.)
Essential information
Opening times: Wednesday and Thursday, 10am-5pm; first Sunday of each month, 2pm-5pm. Free admission. For more information, visit LINK or call 020 8980 6405.

Before the Odeon, Vue and Cineworld, with their plastic containers of pick ‘n’ mix and overpriced popcorn, came cinema’s golden age. A uniformed commissionaire would welcome customers (another would take their hats) and seat them in an auditorium that was periodically sprayed with fragrance to remove the smell of stale cigarette smoke. Kennington’s Cinema Museum is a love letter to these picture houses of yesteryear and is packed with their ephemera, including banks of Art Deco seats, swing doors, a category board displaying the now disused ‘H’ for horror certificate, periodicals like ‘The Kinematograph Weekly’ (printed from 1889 to 1971), cinema sheet music, uniforms, projectors and a whopping 17 million feet of film. It frequently plays host to icons of the industry (Howard Lanning and John Wilson are this month’s guests), as well as film screenings and Saturday morning showings of vintage cartoons. Warning: you’ll never want to don a pair of 3D specs again.
Essential information
Opening times: museum is available most days for guided tours, which must be booked in advance. Tickets: adult, £10, child, £7. For more information and to book tickets, visit LINK or call 020 7840 2200.

If you whiled away your childhood in front of a doll’s house, furnishing its rooms with minute chaises longues and saving your pocket money to splurge on button-sized china plates, the fourth room of Pollock’s Toy Museum is most definitely worth a gander. As well as 10 houses, one of which dates from 1850, the museum contains the quintessential trappings of a Victorian nursery, including china dolls, rocking horses and teddy bears. Elsewhere, its poky rooms are stacked high with tin boats, buses and trains, jumping jacks, a collection of 19th-century toy theatres, Sicilian rod puppets, Ecuadorian toys made from bread dough, European folk toys and retro board games.
Essential information
Opening times: Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm. Tickets: adult, £6, child, £3. For more information, visit LINK or call 020 7636 3452.

Founded by British designer Zandra Rhodes in 2003, the Fashion and Textile Museum is a must-visit for fashion, textile and jewellery fans. Its walls, which are almost as eye-popping as its founder’s fluorescent barnet, are currently hung with the Picasso to Warhol textiles exhibition (running until 17 May), which traces the history of 20th-century art in fabrics from Fauvism to Pop Art and includes the work of masters such as Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí and Henri Matisse, and artist Sarah Campbell’s recent works (until 17 May) – an eclectic array of glass, woven baskets, silks, papers and rugs. The museum also welcomes guest speakers; we’ll be dropping in on the ‘I used to be in Pictures: Hollywood Stories’ talk by Austin and Howard Mutti-Mewse (1 May, 6.30-8pm), who three decades ago sent letters to their favourite icons of the silver screen. Listen, awe-struck, to their yarns about Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor.
Essential information
Opening times: Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-6pm. Tickets: adult, £8.80, child (under 12), free. For more information, visit LINK or call 020 7407 8664.
Source of text and photos: All about you
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