The best weird museums in London
21.07.2023 - 08:13
/ roughguides.com
/ Sherlock Holmes
/ London
London’s wacky and unusual attractions are guaranteed to capture the imagination of those who are brave enough to find them. Adam Bennett follows the footsteps of murderers, surgeons and pathologists to discover some truly bizarre objects in the best weird museums in London.
If you're planning a trip to the UK, get in touch – we can connect you with a local expert to plan an itinerary that suits you perfectly.
The Grant Museum of Zoology in Bloomsbury boasts over 1,000 separate species of rare and extinct animals, the largest collection in the United Kingdom. Among its exhibits, visitors can see the flightless Dodo and a Tasmanian tiger. Perhaps the rarest animal is a Quagga – a half-striped relative of the zebra now hunted to extinction.
A strong contender for the strangest object at the Grant Museum is a collection of eighteen moles, preserved in formaldehyde and stuffed into a jar. The moles even have their own rather amusing Twitter account.
Other weird and wacky objects inside the museum include a collection of stomach-churning brains preserved in alcohol. If you can take more after that, look for the Negus Collection of bisected heads. It's one of the world’s largest collections of preserved mammal heads, including a chimp, a rabbit and a sloth.
Frogs preserved in formalin © Degimages/Shutterstock
A truly unique place, Bart's Pathology Museum was established in 1879 and houses over 5,000 of the oddest specimens from the human body. The museum is part of the larger Barts Medical School, officially St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College. Established in 1123, it's the oldest hospital in the UK. Besides its collection, the museum also runs quirky workshops – try “Taxidermy for Beginners” if you dare. Seek out the skull of John Bellingham, the only man in history to assassinate a British Prime Minister.
Barts medical school and museum also features in the history of Sherlock Holmes. Creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle visited the museum as part of his medical training. It's also said that he wrote some of his short Sherlock stories in one of Bart’s main offices.
Barts is the oldest hospital in the UK, established in the 12th century © Tony Baggett/Shutterstock
Housed in the attic of the old St. Thomas' Hospital church, this is the oldest surviving operating theatre in Britain. This piece of medical history was temporarily lost during the late 1800s when St Thomas’s Hospital moved to Lambeth. It was rediscovered in 1956 when a man named Raymond Russell decided to explore the attic of the original church. As you tour the operating theatre (with seats for observing medical students) it's hard to not to get spooked. You can well imagine the blood-curdling screams of patients operated on without anaesthetic. The