Several of London's wonderful free museums have a scientific focus, and I took so many photos in them that I needed to divide them up into three different web pages:

Science Museum • Natural History Museum • other science museums

The museum just called the London Science Museum is right next door to the granddaddy science museum, the Natural History Museum, but has a broader focus as it covers all the sciences. The NHM is more traditional in its layout, too, although it's come a long way from the days of static displays with little or no explanatory material, the way I remember museums when I was a little girl. However, the Science Museum is even more up-to-date in its treatment of artifacts, and the items on display themselves often have a pop culture pizzazz. I enjoyed both of these giant museums, but if pressed to name a favorite I'd have to say the Science.

I visited three other science-related museums that were smaller and offered fewer photo opportunities: the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, which is still quite large, and is very interesting and informative in its narrow field of interest; the Wellcome Collection, a small but fascinating medical museum near the British Library; and the Garden Museum near Lambeth Palace, which isn't free but has a lovely setting for its small collection, in an old church, and an even narrower focus. Another small but very interesting science museum is the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge, and you can see some photos I took there in the Cambridge section of the website.

You can read about my visits to these museums (almost) as they happened in these blog posts: Natural History Museum visit 1 • Natural History Museum visit 2 • Science Museum • National Maritime Museum • Wellcome Collection • Garden Museum. And you can see more photos than I had room for on these web pages (I took a lot of pictures in the Science Museum especially) in these Flickr sets: Science Museum • other London science museums

Here's a teaser sampling of some of the wonderful exhibits at these museums:

cars at the London Science Museum

giant fossil ammonite at the Natural History Museum

lighthouse optic at the National Maritime Museum

Back to Dream Season home • Back to London home • Back to Museums home