London has enough museums – over 300 and counting – to exhaust even the most ardent culture-vulture. The city is home to some of the world’s greatest collections, including the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Natural History Museum, to name just three.
If the sheer scale of the major museums (and the density of the crowds thronging them) seems daunting, however, then there are plenty of more intimate establishments to explore, covering smaller slices of local or cultural history, such as the absorbing Geffrye Museum, which showcases changing fashions and lifestyles through a series of period interiors dating from 1600 to the present day.
Other museums have been dedicated to – or created by – famous individuals, lending them a sense of personality, and sometimes a decided quirkiness, which is generally missing from the larger public collections.
Notable examples include the Freud Museum, occupying the rambling Hampstead house where the great Viennese psychoanalyst spent his final years and which has been preserved largely as Freud left it, complete with his book-lined study and original consulting couch.
Or the equally enjoyable, if slightly less reverent, Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221b Baker Street, which lovingly recreates the home of the celebrated fictional detective, and features Holmes’s violin, magnifying glass, and chemical apparatus.
Then there’s the unique Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, an elegant old Georgian townhouse once owned by Sir John Soane, one of the foremost architects of his era, who filled it with an extraordinary array of artworks and antiquities collected from around the world, piled up around the atmospheric old house in a picturesque jumble.