Every city has landmarks. London has a subtler asset: an enormous number of small, strange, specific places that exist nowhere else and that most visitors never hear about. Some are museums, some are buildings that were never meant to survive, and a few are difficult to categorise at all. None of them is on a postcard.
Houses left exactly as they were
Sir John Soane’s Museum, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The home of the architect who built the Bank of England, preserved by an act of Parliament on the condition that nothing be moved. The result is a house stuffed floor to ceiling with antiquities, with an Egyptian sarcophagus in the basement and picture rooms where the walls open outwards on hinges to reveal more paintings behind. Free entry. Probably the single most unusual interior in Britain.
Dennis Severs’ House, Spitalfields. A Georgian house arranged as though the family living in it has just left the room: food on the table, fires lit, chamber pots unemptied. You walk through it in silence. It is theatre rather than a museum and people either find it extraordinary or absurd, with very little in between. Book ahead, as visitor numbers are deliberately limited.
Leighton House, Holland Park. The home of a Victorian painter who built himself an Arab Hall with a gold mosaic frieze and a fountain in the middle of Kensington. It should not work and it entirely does.
Museums for specialists that anyone can visit
The Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL is one room, floor to ceiling in glass jars, including a jar of moles that has become mildly famous. It is free and takes twenty minutes.
The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons holds an eighteenth-century surgeon’s anatomical collection. It is a serious museum about the history of medicine and it is not for everyone, which it states clearly at the door.
The Postal Museum in Clerkenwell runs Mail Rail, a narrow-gauge railway in the tunnels beneath Mount Pleasant that moved London’s post underground for most of the twentieth century. You ride it. It is properly odd.
Buildings that should not still be here
Wilton’s Music Hall, Whitechapel. The oldest surviving grand music hall in the world, rescued from demolition and deliberately conserved rather than restored, so the peeling walls stay peeling. It still puts on shows and still has a bar. Go for whatever is on and look at the room.
The Barbican Conservatory. A tropical glasshouse with over a thousand species, hidden in the upper levels of a brutalist estate. Open limited hours, usually weekends, free. Almost nobody knows it is there.
Eltham Palace, south east London. A medieval royal palace with a 1930s art deco millionaire’s house grafted onto the side of it. The two halves should clash horribly. They do not.
Places with a strange history
Highgate Cemetery. Victorian, overgrown on purpose, and the west side can only be seen on a guided tour. Marx is in the east side. The west is the one worth booking.
Crossbones Graveyard, Southwark. An unconsecrated burial ground for the medieval women who worked the Bankside brothels, and later for the local poor. It is now a small memorial garden covered in ribbons left by visitors. It takes ten minutes and it stays with you.
The Churchill War Rooms. The underground bunker from which the war was run, left largely as it was when the lights were switched off in 1945. It is the most visited thing on this list and still genuinely strange: a working basement, frozen.
Just plain odd
God’s Own Junkyard, Walthamstow. A warehouse of salvaged neon: film props, fairground signs, religious iconography in tubes of coloured gas, with a cafe in the middle. Weekends only. Overwhelming in the best way.
The Seven Noses of Soho. Fourteen plaster noses were stuck to buildings around central London in the 1990s as a protest against CCTV. Several survive. Hunting them is a genuinely enjoyable way to spend an afternoon walking, and nobody will tell you where they are.
Practical notes
Book the small ones. Dennis Severs’ House and the Highgate west side tour both limit numbers and both sell out. The rest are walk-in.
Check the day. The Barbican Conservatory opens on limited days, God’s Own Junkyard is weekends, and several small museums close on Mondays. This is the list most likely to catch you out on opening hours.
Most of these are free. Soane, the Grant, the Hunterian, Crossbones and the Conservatory cost nothing. Budget for the tours and the journeys, not the entry.
If you want what is currently good rather than what is permanently strange, cool things to do in London is the companion piece. If your time is short and everything needs to be central, things to do in central London stays inside Zone 1. Both sit under our main guide to what to do in London.