Museums in London are really impressive or better to say museum collections are truly amazing. Here you can learn a lot about European painting, practically from the beginning to the late XX century. What will be especially interesting for visitors is that the entrance to most museums in this city is completely free of charge. We would definitely advise our visitors to review the list of museums and determine those they want to visit according to their own wishes and choices.
The National Gallery is a museum you definitely must visit, especially if you are visiting London for the first time. It is located on the north side of Trafalgar Square, and is one of the most important art museums in London, and one of the most famous museums in the world. The National Gallery was established in 1824, when the British government bought around 30 pieces of art, mostly paintings, from a banker called John Angerstein. The development and growth of the museum happened very quickly, and it now houses around 2300 pieces of art, most of which were actually donated by Britain’s notable people. Due to the quick pace at which the growth of its collection went at, the National Gallery moved three times, and is currently situated in a building on the Trafalgar Square which was designed by William Wilkins.
The British Museum is one of the oldest museums in the world, and its collection is impressive and definitely worth seeing. Every year, this museum is visited by around 5 million people, which puts it on the same level as the Louvre, the Vatican Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The museum officially opened in 1759, with its original collection belonging to Sir Hans Sloane. This British physician and art collector owned a total of around 400 thousand books and antiques dating back to ancient Greece, Rome, America and the Middle East.
The Natural History Museum in London is a museum dedicated to the world of nature, its history and specimens. The museum boasts a giant collection with over 70 thousand fossils. The museum itself was opened in 1880, and it was originally intended to keep collections of bones, fossils and plants that were prior part of the British Museum’s collection. The museum’s collection grew endlessly, and in 1986 the Geological Museum’s collection was merged with the prior’. The very entrance to the museum will be breathtaking to many, especially the youngest visitors, as the great hall there contains giant skeletal remains of a diplodocus and a mastodon, which originally came from Chile. The cover photo on our website will provide you with a view of this area.
Madame Tussauds is a museum opened in 1884 in London to depict the world’s celebrities immortalized in wax in natural size. It is highly innovative and popular worldwide. The same museum was later opened in New York. Sculptor Marie Tussaud created her first wax sculture exhibition in London in 1835. Even though the tickets for the museum were cheap, it was a great success. The wax sculpture collection of Madame Tussauds became the main tourist attraction of London. In 2010, the London Planetarium was moved into the west wing of the museum. Today’s wax figures in the museum include historical and royal figures, film and sport stars. It boasts several permanent exhibitions separated into categories.
Victoria and Albert Museum is the largest applied arts and design museum in the world, spreading over seven floors. The museum exhibits 4.5 million items of artistic value. It was officially opened in 1852, and was renamed into its current name in 1899, after the royal couple, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. It contains extensive Hinduistic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Islamic and European decorative arts collections.
