What is the coolest museum in London?

HSA keeps promising to take me, but he never does. :-(

Is the Canal Museum really lame? That sucks, I always wanted to go, but I probably know more about the Canal than they do...

Oh! And I can't believe that I forgot the Museum of the City Of London. Small, but very very good, a bit like a living Ackroyd book.

S**tchi Gallery is not a museum. It is a gallery. Therefore disqualified! (Besides, it looks quite lame from the outside, too much like yBa Disneyland.)

i have always been intrigued by the barnet museum, a tiny little building that is open i think 90 minutes a week

to be fair the reason i wz at the canal museum wz it wz the venue for a party, at a time when i wz v.miserable

there did not seem to be much there, but maybe it wez hidden behind the doritos

Hrmmmm. Maybe Canal Museum bears examination without Doritos?

i still have not been to Tate Modern (!), or Tate Britain for that matter...for shame...

And the V&A has the William Morris tea room (though the last time I was there, they weren't serving any tea.) :-(

The Science Museum is great for all the model machinery with handles you can spin and buttons to push; and the way that some of the out-of-the-way galleries don't seem to have been altered since it was opened in the 60s. It's also got the world's last working pre-transistor computer (a Ferranti Pegasus), and a slightly bizarre water-powered analog computer which does economics simulations.

I vaguely remember, in the 80s, there was a toy museum in Praed Street, by Paddington Station. It had a back garden with a huge, complex model railway line running round it.

Geffrye Museum is very cool - interiors through the ages; watch for the New Labour sitting room with beech veneer flooring and Jacobsen chairs.

City of London museum at London Wall also cool - wonder what River Fleet nonsense they have there?

I believe the toy museum is in Craven Hill W2.

it's especially good if you've skipped out of Glasto with a load of leftover spangles. I seem to remember the film "An Outragaeous Poaching Escapade" to be clearly the most amusing film ever made.

I remember visiting the Museum of the Moving Image on a school trip in the early 90s. Can't remember much about it, though.

The London Transport Museum is good but a bit small for the entry fee. I was entranced by all the old tube maps, but it's not so good on the technical stuff. The museum shop is great for official LT merchandise, of course.

Nooooo! I didn't see the Time Team special! Oh no! I have to go back to the Museum of the City of London then, to see this water-lifting engine! How cool!

They were all very cool that is why I couldn't choose.

http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=532250&y=184750&z=1&sv=532250,184750&st=4&ar=N&mapp=newmap.srf&searchp=newsearch.srf

in the middle left square, i am in the bottom right square at the minute, it is about a 5 min walk from my house

The current show, Days Like These, at Tate Britain is fabulous. The title vid is particularly lovely, but there are loads of delights. I can't say I care for that much of the permanent collection, though.

Tate Modern is my favourite. Most of my favourite art is post-1900, say, and this is the best collection of same in this country. It's also a terrific building and the turbine hall is a fantastic new inspirational space, I think. I also love the hanging philosophy, as I think the series of -isms approach is uninteresting and distorting.

My most frequent haunt is the British Museum, as it's only five minutes walk from work, therefore good for a lunchtime visit. My favourite part is the South-East Asian galleries at the back, especially the Japanese one up top. The Korean one seems to be closed until 2pm these days, though. The parts I go to least are the big box office parts - I can't work up too much interest in Egypt, Greece and Rome (apart from the odd sculpture from the alst two).

I want to visit this music museum in Brentford that is supposed to have a large collection of mechanical musical instruments, but it never seems to be open.

Why so little love for the Natural History Museum? It's one of the most incredible buildings in London and has GIANT DINOSAUR SKELETONS, for fuck's sake. I haven't been to either for years, but I remember it fully kicking the Science Museum in the nuts.

the design museum was a bag full of dysappointment.

The Childhood Museum up at Bethnal Green is pretty out there - all these sugar-coated dusty old devices and distractions - and rooms full of very dark and disturbing dolls, twisted mannequins, bent and withered with the weight of years, staring out at you from behind glass cages, their dull eyes unblinking.
-- Alex K (alex...), May 2nd, 2003 3:03 PM. (Alex K) (link)

My vote, as always (this has come up at least three times before), goes to the Geffrye, followed by the London Transport and Museum of London. I'm not keen on the Natural History because I don't like dead animals. Dead humans are ok though - I can still picture the shrunken head at the Horniman (saw it when I was ten or so).

How funny, I was going to ask this question, and searched the archive to see if anyone had already asked it, and found that I had myself already asked it a year ago!

Yesterday I went to the Natural History Museum. (I have been taking advantage of my last few weeks of unemployment to enjoy the free museums of London and several museums in Paris.) My impressions got me wondering...

The building is beyond gorgeous, utterly lovely. But rammed to the gills with annoying groups of schoolchildren. Sigh. I was not as impressed with it as I might have once been. I enjoyed the Victorian taxonomy - I wandered around their rock collection for the best part of an hour. But found the mangey stuffed animals more than slightly disconcerting - not just in their actuality, but in the museum's slightly revisionist conservationist approach to them. Still, it was thought provoking and interesting, even if disturbing.

And then I wandered through into the Earth Science portion of the building. Which has recently undergone some kind of glitzy multimedia makeover. At first I was intrigued, as I travelled up a Space Escalator very similar to the one at The Trocadero.

And then it started to irritate me. The flashing lights, the interactive "games", the showbiz lighting, the endless television screens showing documentaries, and more than anything else, the sheer NOISE of it. I think of museums as places of quiet contemplation where you are able to study and synthesise the things which you are learning. This was indeed like being at an entertainments centre.

Plus, the pacing of it was all wrong. With placards and signs, perhaps they are not as immediate or showy, or "interactive" - but at least one is able to enjoy them at one's own pace. With the films and games, I found myself irritably wishing it would hurry up at certain moments, and slow down to let me absorb other moments.

Perhaps buttons and interactivity and the WHIZZ BANG FIZZ!!! is obviously popular with The Kids, as the museum was rammed with them. But I do have to think that something in the way of quiet contemplation and outright... WONDER has been lost in the Nu Museum.

Thoughts? Anyone else?

Children have imaginations, they are perfectly happy to look at dinosaur bones and imagine monsters. They don't need this silly animatronics nonsense.

I guessed that it was because traditionally the science people are always the hyperactive geeks who like to touch things whereas the arty kids are the ones who like to stand in front of a painting and ponder.

The CRASH! BANG! WALLOP! was exactly the sort of thing that I really enjoyed about the Science Museum, the dark satanic mills and the steam engines and everything.

But there's a big difference between actually seeing and hearing and experiencing the danger and the wonder - and having some videotape robot telling you about crashes and bangs.

Who knows, maybe it's health and safety regulations or something.

Science museum is exception that proves the rule.

That said, the actual moving Kobe earthquake experience was so good I stood through it three times!

It's great that it's popular, I suppose, but I have never had a good experience there. The only good thing I can think of is that creating this also created Tate Britain, which is wonderful in comparison.

Second the votes for the Tea & Coffee, Museum of Childhood, Geffrye, but the British Museum is best. Don't get me started on the Design Museum - £6 to look at some Dysons in cases?

ps i hate tate modern!

Kate OTM about imagination - I still imagine even when I go there now what it would be like if the huge fossil in the front hall started wandering around the park, gently nibbling at trees and absently swatting cars with a misplaced tailswat.

I love the National Portrait Gallery - that seems to be more the sort of thing that you are describing, NRQ. It's not a history of just London, but it is a long and winding narrative about the history of the British Imagination in the guise of those who inspired it.

Kate totally otm way up there and way back when. I walked to the Tate B in the rain for those Pre-Raphaelites! Best collection in the universe, all the ones that matter.

I get bored of interactive stuff quickly, or skip over it altogether, although the rock section had some kind of meteorite display at the end which was slightly more up to date in the same interactively presented way, but that was alright since it managed to convey some kind of 1950's Futuristic Uranium atmosphere more than anything. Wonder is a bit lost when the museum displays look more like video games and TV than museums. There's something wonderfully analog about museums that I hate to see boarded over with interactivity and stuff. For the kids though it seems to be mostly about the field trip experience (day off school, more socializing, nominal work and supervision) than the actual information displayed.

Was in the Tate Modern on Tuesday briefly. The current Nauman installation in the Turbine Hall is not so great methinks. Interesting concept I guess, but not the best use of that space. End result was like standing in a train station. What was previous to it? The sunrise thing? A far simpler idea perhaps, but really much more impressive.

I went there recently to see some music and was struck by just how puny and few and far between the exhibits were, all faded and shabby (these were not objects of any great antiquity either, they look like they might have been in someone’s loft since the 50s). Its possible they’d moved the good stuff out for the music and of course I have zero interest in garden history but still…

I keep imagining elderly folk coming down on long and uncomfortable coach journeys from the provinces to visit the museum and being tremendously disappointed.

When I was little I had a great book about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs coming alive at night. The iguanadon was upset that he didn't look like a *real* iguanadon, so one night a boy rode him to the Natural History Museum so he could see what he was supposed to look like.

not enough love here for the Victorua and Albert Museum (which I always say/think of as "The Victorian Albert Museum").. I love the long morbid reliquaries.. ancient French kings entombed in surprisingly short coffins. Some of the busts in there, I swear they were going to turn around and look at me.

I'm surprised that I didn't mention, upthread, the time I went to London a few years ago and stayed with Liz D. At the Science Museum, I spent ages carefully studying a case full of Klein Bottles of varying complexity. Getting back to Liz's flat, I occupied myself by borrowing one of her library books - Amaryllis Night And Day by Russell Hoban - in which, entirely coincidentally, the main character becomes obsessed with someone he meets whilst studying the case of Klein Bottles at the Science Museum. There's even a long interview in the book between the fictional protagonist and the real glassblower who made them all.

As an aside, I like Nauman but thought that his Turbine Hall thing was just awful, disorienting and silly, all the worst aspects of Sound Art dispersed around an otherwise beautiful and awe-inspiring space. The sun thing/microclimate that they had there last year used the space to its best advantage, so it's a shame to see the Turbine Hall and Nauman so ill used.

I cannot echo enough love for the V&A. The cast rooms are so amazing, like a trip around the continent of Europe in a few minutes. And I love the way that things are regimented in that Victorian classification system, no matter what they are - wrought iron gates, locks and keys, varying types of Chinese silk, Indian paisley and Lace all systemised like butterflies. I love it!

And they have actually managed to integrate the "interactive" experience in a way that is not intrusive but instructive, i.e. some imagination is required. You can try on the clothes. Or sit at a computer and create your own Spitalfields silk design or a Victorian bookplate or a crest and coat of arms - and then print it or email it to yourself! It's truly interactive and creative. I loved it as an adult and would have loved it even more as a child.

Why no love for the National Portrait Gallery? That's among my faves. You can see the woman who died from a surfeit of tarts. Relatively few museums are as embracing of the entire span of a nation's history--equal space for Sir Thomas More and Mick Jagger, for example.

As for this, upthread:

there's a small organ museum in St Albans

my inner 12-year-old wants to append AND IN YOUR PANTS.

I still have not been to the London transport museum depot in Southall yet, but it's only open one friday a month and a couple of weekends a year. I expect great things of it though.