Unique Things to Do in London You Have Not Done

At Sir John Soane’s Museum the picture room walls swing open on hinges to reveal more paintings hung behind them. They are opened to a published timetable, not on request. The north wall, which holds A Rake’s Progress, is opened at 2pm. The south wall recess is opened at 11am, 3pm and 4pm.

Arrive at half past twelve and you will walk through a room of closed walls and never know what you missed. That timetable is printed on the museum’s own visitor page and almost no guide to unusual things to do in London repeats it.

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. They publish exactly what they are and exactly when, and the detail that decides whether the trip works is usually the one nobody copies across. Here is what each of them actually says.

How many days a year each one is actually open

This is the table nobody publishes and it is the one that decides the trip. Two of the best places on this page open on fewer days than most people have holiday.

Where	When it opens	Days a year, roughly
Brixton Windmill	Second weekend of the month, March to October	16
The Barbican Conservatory	Selected dates only, tickets released a month ahead	Published in batches, never a full week
God’s Own Junkyard	Friday, Saturday, Sunday	156
The Old Operating Theatre	Thursday to Sunday	208
The Grant Museum of Zoology	Tuesday to Saturday, afternoons only, 1pm to 5pm	About 250, at 20 hours a week
The Hunterian Museum	Tuesday to Saturday. Shut Sunday, Monday and bank holidays	About 250
Sir John Soane’s Museum	Wednesday to Sunday, open on bank holidays	About 260
Novelty Automation	Every day except Monday	About 310
The Postal Museum and Mail Rail	Tuesday to Sunday	About 310

Note the two rows that contradict each other on the same square. The Soane and the Hunterian are five minutes apart in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and one opens on bank holidays while the other shuts. Assuming a pattern across this page is the single most common way to waste a morning.

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. Entry is free, there is no need to pre-book, and you can walk in on the day. Open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm, with last admission usually 4:30pm, though the museum warns it may close admissions earlier when it reaches capacity. Closed Monday and Tuesday, but open on bank holidays, which is the reverse of most museums and worth knowing on a long weekend.

Two free extras are not bookable and go unmentioned almost everywhere. Free tours of the Private Apartments on the second floor run at 2pm on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, cannot be booked in advance, and take a maximum of eight people at a time on a first come first served basis. There are free tours of the Drawing Office too, at 2.30pm on Thursdays and Saturdays for up to six people, the oldest surviving example of its kind, which opened to the public in May 2023 for the first time in two hundred years. Probably the single most unusual interior in Britain.

Dennis Severs’ House, 18 Folgate Street, E1 6BX. 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. It is theatre rather than a museum and people either find it extraordinary or absurd, with very little in between.

Silence is now one option rather than the only one. The house runs a Silent Day Visit, a Silent Night Visit and a Relaxed Day Visit at £16 plus a £1.50 booking fee, lasting 45 minutes, where talking is allowed. It also programmes A Ghost Story by Candlelight, a Dennis Severs’ Tour and occasional Armchair Concerts. All are booked in advance and numbers are deliberately small.

The house rules are unusual enough to read before you go, and all of them are published. Latecomers cannot be admitted, and tickets are non-refundable and cannot be exchanged or transferred. There are no toilets in the building. Photography and filming are not permitted. Stiletto heels cannot be worn, because they damage the fabric of the building. Only handbags and small backpacks come in, carried in your hand, and there is nowhere to leave luggage, pushchairs or scooters. Under 16s need one adult each. Nuts are used and displayed throughout the house, and because the fires are open the smoke can build, which the house flags for anyone with respiratory concerns. Uneven floors and many stairs mean it is not accessible.

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

How the ticketing works across all of them, and when a membership pays for itself, is covered in our guide to London exhibitions.

The Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL is one room holding 100,000 specimens, floor to ceiling in glass jars, including a jar of moles that has become mildly famous. It has been in continuous use by UCL students since 1828 and open to the public since 1996. Free admission, no booking required, and open Tuesday to Saturday from 1pm to 5pm. That afternoon-only window is the thing to note: turn up at eleven and the door is shut. It takes twenty minutes.

The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields 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. Free to everyone, open Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm with a recommended last entry of 4pm, and closed on Sundays, Mondays and bank holidays. The bank holiday closure is the one that catches people out, because it is the opposite of the Soane a few minutes away on the same square. Pre-booking is recommended to avoid queueing at busy times.

There is a free Curator Highlights Tour every Wednesday at 2:15pm, with no booking, twelve places, first come first served, requested from the reception desk when you arrive. The museum asks visitors to respect the human remains on display and not to post close ups of them.

The Postal Museum at 15 to 20 Phoenix Place, WC1X 0DA, 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. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 17:00.

The ticket is an annual pass, and hardly anybody mentions it. One admission gives unlimited access to the museum for a year from the date of your visit, plus one ride on Mail Rail valid on that first visit. If you live here, or you are coming back, the price per visit collapses.

Two practical notes from their own page. The museum and Mail Rail are in separate buildings on opposite sides of Phoenix Place, and you go to Mail Rail first, arriving just before the time printed on your ticket. And booking ahead is recommended, because weekends and busy periods sell out with only limited walk-up tickets left.

The Old Operating Theatre Museum, in the roof of St Thomas’ Church at 9a St Thomas Street, SE1 9RY, is the oldest surviving operating theatre in Europe, two minutes from London Bridge station. Thursday to Sunday, 10.30am to 5pm, last entry 4.15pm. £10 adult, £8 concession, £6.50 child and free under five. The detail that decides it: you reach it by a 52-step spiral staircase, and an accessible entrance is available if you ask the museum before you travel rather than on the day.

Hidden London tours, and the stations that closed

Hidden London, run by the London Transport Museum, is the way into the stations that closed. Twelve secret locations, among them disused stations, wartime shelters, filming locations and corridors sealed as they were, plus one walking tour above ground, all on guided visits. Tours are for guests aged ten and over, and at the time of writing tickets were on sale for tours running until March 2027, with later dates released through the museum’s newsletter.

Aldwych station is the one to book first. It closed to the public more than thirty years ago and was a wartime shelter before it became the Tube station every period drama borrows. The ticket hall, lifts and platforms are all still there. The Aldwych tour runs on multiple dates from Wednesday 7 October 2026 to Sunday 21 February 2027, and a new family edition starts on 21 October. These are the Hidden London tours people mean, and like everything else on this page, the dates are the whole story.

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 around 1,500 species, hidden in the upper levels of a brutalist estate. Almost nobody knows it is there, and the way in has changed. Admission is free but now ticketed. Tickets are released online a month in advance, a limited number of day tickets go on sale from 9:30am on each day it opens, and there is a waiting list for returns. Turning up at the door and hoping, which used to work, no longer does.

Brixton Windmill, Windmill Gardens, Blenheim Gardens, SW2 5DA. A working windmill of 1816 standing in a park in south London, which is not a thing that should have survived and did. It is usually open for tours on the second weekend of every month from March to October, and that is the whole year. Sixteen days, booked in advance. The gardens around it are open far more often than the mill is, so read the date before making the journey for the building itself.

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.

What to see in London if you want a strange history

Highgate Cemetery. Victorian and overgrown on purpose. The rule that the West side could only be seen on a guided tour has gone. One admission ticket now covers both sides and you are free to wander, though the cemetery still recommends a guided tour if you have not been before, and the tours run about 75 minutes. Marx is on the East side. The West is the one worth the tour.

Open daily 10am to 5pm from March to October with last entry at 4.30pm, and 10am to 4pm from November to February with last entry at 3.30pm. Adult admission is £10. It is an active burial ground and visitors are asked to behave quietly. Groups of ten or more must book two weeks ahead, and there are no private tours at weekends. Tours can be cancelled in strong winds or ice, with a full refund.

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, Unit 12 Ravenswood Industrial Estate, Shernhall Street, E17 9HQ. A warehouse of salvaged neon: film props, fairground signs, religious iconography in tubes of coloured gas, with the Rolling Scones cafe and bar in the middle of it. Overwhelming in the best way.

It is Friday to Sunday, not weekends only, and Friday and Saturday run to 10pm. Friday 11am to 10pm, Saturday 11am to 10pm, Sunday 11am to 6pm. Neon after dark is the entire point, so the late Friday is the best slot on this page. One catch: DSLR cameras are not allowed and phone cameras are, for personal or social use. It also closes early for occasional private events, at 2pm on Saturday 24 October for one, so check before you travel.

Novelty Automation, 1a Princeton Street, WC1R 4AX, five minutes from Holborn. A room of satirical homemade arcade machines, twinned with the Under the Pier Show at Southwold. Open every day except Monday, 11am to 6pm, with Thursday running 12pm to 8pm and Sunday 12pm to 6pm. Free to enter and effectively £28 to do properly, because tokens are five for £6, ten for £10 and 35 for £28, and 35 is what it takes to try every machine. One warning they publish themselves: the building is 17th century and the front door is 650mm wide, which is narrower than many wheelchairs.

The Seven Noses of Soho. The artist Rick Buckley stuck about 35 plaster casts of his own nose to buildings around London in 1997, the National Gallery and Tate Britain among them, as a protest against the spread of CCTV. Inspired by the Situationists, he installed them under the noses of the cameras. By 2011 only about ten had survived.

He never publicised the prank, which is why the myths filled the gap. The nose inside Admiralty Arch was said to mock Napoleon and to be tweaked by cavalry troopers riding through from Horse Guards. Another story held that finding all seven of the Soho noses brought great fortune. There were never seven, and the seven is the legend rather than the artwork.

The surviving locations are published, so you do not have to hunt blind: Admiralty Arch, Great Windmill Street, Meard Street, Bateman Street, Dean Street, Endell Street and D’Arblay Street. The Dean Street nose is outside Quo Vadis. It costs nothing and it is a genuinely good reason to walk the West End with a purpose.

What secret London actually means

The phrase covers two different things and only one of them needs planning.

The first is genuinely restricted access: a windmill on sixteen days, a conservatory behind a ticket release, a house entered in silence in groups small enough to count. These stay good precisely because the access is limited. This is the real secret London, and the barrier is the calendar rather than the price, since most of it is free.

The second is a set of well known places relabelled as London hidden gems. Neon in Walthamstow and a Victorian operating theatre above London Bridge are not secrets. They are signposted, they are open most of the week, and they feel undiscovered only because the person writing the list had not been either. Both kinds are worth doing. Only the first kind can be missed by turning up on a Tuesday.

Practical notes

Book the small ones. Dennis Severs’ House sells out and every visit type is ticketed. Highgate now sells one ticket for both sides, so the tour is a recommendation rather than the only way in. The Barbican Conservatory releases its free tickets a month ahead, with a few more at 9:30am on the day. Soane, the Grant, the Hunterian and the noses are walk-in.

Check the day, and the hour. The Grant Museum is Tuesday to Saturday afternoons only, 1pm to 5pm. The Hunterian is Tuesday to Saturday and shuts on bank holidays. The Soane is Wednesday to Sunday and stays open on bank holidays. God’s Own Junkyard is Friday to Sunday. The Barbican Conservatory opens on limited days. This is the list most likely to catch you out on opening hours, and those four contradict each other, so read them individually rather than assuming a pattern.

Most of these are free. Soane, the Grant, the Hunterian, Crossbones, the noses and the Conservatory all cost nothing, though the Conservatory now needs a free ticket, released a month ahead with a few more on the day. Budget for the ticketed houses, the tours and the journeys, not the entry.

Everything here was taken from each place’s own published pages and rechecked on 28 September 2026. That is what separates a working list of unique things to do in London from a copied one: Four of these entries had changed since they were first written, which is the usual rate on a list like this, so confirm opening days before a special journey.

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.

Immersive experiences covers the ticketed end of the unusual, where most published guides are out of date within months.

Questions we get asked

What is there to see in London?

Beyond the landmarks everyone already knows, London's real asset is the number of small, specific places that exist nowhere else: houses kept exactly as their owners left them, single subject museums, and buildings that were never meant to survive and did. Most visitors never hear about any of it, and almost all of it is free. That is what this page is a list of.

What should you visit in London?

Pick one landmark and one oddity rather than four landmarks. The famous sights are famous for good reasons and take an hour each; the places on this page take twenty minutes and are the ones you will still be describing to people a year later. The free things page covers the great collections, which cost nothing and are the other half of the answer.

What are the most popular things to do in London?

The landmarks along the river and the national museums, which is why both are crowded. The museums are the better half of that: they are free, they are enormous, and the permanent collections are the reason they exist. If you want the popular list without the crowd, go on a weekday morning or after six on a late night opening.

What are the most unusual things to do in London?

Houses left exactly as they were, which is a category London does better than anywhere: Sir John Soane’s Museum, free and open Wednesday to Sunday, and Dennis Severs’ House, which is ticketed and where one visit type now allows talking. Then the specialist museums that anyone can walk into, the Grant Museum of Zoology, open Tuesday to Saturday afternoons only, and the Hunterian, closed on bank holidays. Then Wilton’s Music Hall, which should not still be standing and is.

Are London’s unusual attractions free?

Most of them are. Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Grant Museum of Zoology and the Hunterian Museum all charge nothing, and the outdoor oddities, Crossbones Graveyard and the London Noses among them, cost nothing by definition. The Barbican Conservatory is free but now needs a ticket, released a month ahead, with a few more from 9:30am on the day. The ones that charge are the candlelit house visits and Highgate Cemetery, which asks a sightseeing fee to fund its upkeep.

Do you need to book?

Book the houses. Every visit to Dennis Severs’ House is ticketed, numbers are small, and latecomers are not admitted. The Barbican Conservatory is free but ticketed, with tickets released online a month ahead and a limited number of day tickets from 9:30am on each opening day. Sir John Soane’s Museum and the Grant Museum you can walk straight into with no booking at all, and the Hunterian is free but recommends booking to skip the queue at busy times.

What is the strangest thing on the list?

The London Noses. The artist Rick Buckley fixed about 35 plaster casts of his own nose to buildings around London in 1997 in protest at the spread of CCTV, and by 2011 only about ten had survived. He never publicised it, so the myths arrived instead, including the story that finding all seven Soho noses brings great fortune. There were never seven. The surviving ones are at Admiralty Arch, Great Windmill Street, Meard Street, Bateman Street, Dean Street, Endell Street and D’Arblay Street.