Free national collections, the densest gallery map in Europe, and a city that keeps its strangest rooms behind ordinary front doors.
Western painting from Giotto to Cézanne, free, in one building. The Sainsbury Wing reopened in 2025 after its renovation, with the early Renaissance rooms rehung.
British art from 1500 to now, and the Clore Galleries, built to hold the Turner Bequest. Quieter than Tate Modern and often better.
A power station turned into the world's most visited modern art museum. The Turbine Hall commission changes every autumn.
A private collection left to the nation in 1897 on condition that nothing ever leaves the house: French 18th-century painting, armour, Sèvres, and Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier.
A small university collection with an outsized Impressionist room: Manet, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.
Two million years of human making. Too big to see: choose three rooms. The Assyrian lion-hunt reliefs (Room 10) are among the greatest carvings anywhere.
Design and decorative art across five thousand years. The Cast Courts hold full-size plaster copies of Trajan's Column and Michelangelo's David.
Hauser & Wirth, Gagosian, White Cube, Sadie Coles, Thaddaeus Ropac and the old-master dealers of St James's, all within ten minutes' walk.
Rooms, ruins and curiosities: the city's other museum.
The painter Frederic Leighton's house, built around an Arab Hall lined with Iznik and Damascus tiles he collected on his travels in Turkey, Syria and Egypt, with a fountain in the floor.
James Thornhill spent nineteen years (1707–26) painting this hall, often called Britain's Sistine Chapel. He painted himself in, at the far end, holding out his hand for payment.
A small churchyard garden holding G.F. Watts's Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice: glazed Doulton tiles recording ordinary people who died saving others.
Ten rooms arranged as if a family of Huguenot silk weavers had just left them, from 1724 to 1914. Candlelit, half-eaten bread, silence requested.
A Victorian cemetery of catacombs, an Egyptian Avenue and a Circle of Lebanon, slowly being taken back by ivy. Karl Marx is in the East Cemetery.
Morris's family home, now a museum of his wallpapers, textiles and politics, in a park at the end of the Victoria line.
Behind the arts centre's fly tower, London's second-largest conservatory: more than 1,500 species of plants climbing over Brutalist concrete, with koi in the pools.
Ernő Goldfinger's 31-storey Brutalist tower of 1972, with its lift-and-service shaft set apart and joined by a bridge every three floors. Once dreaded, now listed and loved.
Chris Bracey's warehouse of neon signs, from Soho sex shops to film sets, all lit at once. His family still runs it.
In the 1930s the millionaires Stephen and Virginia Courtauld built an Art Deco house onto a medieval royal palace. It has a circular entrance hall lined with marquetry and a heated cage for their pet lemur.
National Gallery · 21 Nov 2026 – 11 Apr 2027
Dulwich Picture Gallery · until 17 Jan 2027
Hayward Gallery · 24 Nov 2026 – 14 Mar 2027
Tate Britain · until 14 Feb 2027
See the full selection →The Bloomsbury group's painted farmhouse in Sussex, about an hour and a half away.
Turner Contemporary, on the spot where Turner stayed to paint the sea; 90 minutes by train.
Jim Ede's house of Ben Nicholson, Gaudier-Brzeska and pebbles; an hour by train.
Curator's Highlight · November 2026
The List · November 2026
The National Gallery at opening → walk down Whitehall to Tate Britain → riverboat from Millbank Pier to Bankside → Tate Modern → cross the Millennium Bridge → Postman's Park → evening at Dennis Severs' House.