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Back in January, I shared a blog on five small London museums that you might not have visited - and it turns out plenty of you had your own favourites to add. Here are my top picks from your suggestions: a mix of the immersive, the unexpected and the easily overlooked. If you’re looking to go a little beyond London’s usual museum circuit, these are well worth your time.  Dennis Severs House Step through the front door of Dennis Severs House and you don’t so much enter a museum as trespass into an imagined family’s 18th and 19th-century life. This narrow Georgian townhouse in Spitalfields was the extraordinary creation of Dennis Severs, an American artist who, in the late 1970s, began conjuring the home of a Huguenot silk-weaving family from thin air. Room by room, floor by floor, he staged their existence and their imagined journey from prosperity to poverty. The house is a living, breathing illusion. Half-drunk cups of tea, unmade beds and lingering scents leave you with the unsettling sense that you’ve arrived moments after the occupants slipped out. It’s theatre without actors, immersive without gimmickry, and entirely unlike anywhere else in London. You won’t just see it – you’ll feel it. Leighton House and Sambourne House Visit Leighton House and Sambourne House and you’ll come away with a fuller picture of Victorian London lives – from the inside. Just a short walk apart in Kensington, these two former homes offer sharply contrasting takes on how the era’s creative figures lived, worked and presented themselves. Leighton House, once home to enigmatic artist Frederic Leighton, is designed to impress. Best known for the Arab Hall, with its intricate tiles, golden mosaics and central fountain, the house is full of bold, decorative choices, from the grand studio to the richly detailed interiors. It’s a space built with visitors and guests in mind, reflecting both artistic ambition and social standing. A few minutes away, Sambourne House tells a quieter story. This is the former home of Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne and his family, and it has been preserved almost exactly as it was around 1900. The rooms are densely layered with patterned wallpapers, photographs, books and everyday objects, offering a clear sense of how the house functioned as a family home. Seen together, the two make an ideal double bill.   Foundling Museum Tucked away in Bloomsbury, the Foundling Museum sits on the site of the Foundling Hospital, established in 1739 as the UK’s first home for children at risk of abandonment. What began as a radical social experiment, caring for and raising foundlings, became one of the most significant charitable institutions in Georgian London. Today, the museum brings that history to life through a mix of art, objects and personal stories. There are moving reminders of the children themselves, including the tokens mothers left behind in the hope of one day reclaiming them, alongside works connected to early supporters like William Hogarth and George Frideric Handel. If you’re interested in London’s social history, or just want something a little different from the usual circuit, it’s well worth seeking out.  The Old Operating Theatre Hidden away in the attic of a church near London Bridge, the Old Operating Theatre is one of the city’s more unusual museums. Dating back to the early 19th century, it’s the oldest surviving surgical theatre in Europe. Originally used to treat patients from St Thomas’ Hospital before the age of anaesthetics and antiseptics, it is reached via a narrow spiral staircase and feels a world away from modern London. The space itself is small and stark, with wooden benches rising steeply around an operating table where students once gathered to watch procedures carried out in full view. The surrounding garret rooms display surgical instruments, herbs and medical equipment, giving a clear sense of how medicine was practised at the time. It’s not for the squeamish, but it is fascinating - offering a direct, unvarnished look at the realities of early surgery, and a perspective on how far things have come.   London Canal Museum
Tucked into a former ice warehouse near King’s Cross, the London Canal Museum offers a different perspective on the city’s history - one shaped by water rather than streets. Set alongside the Regent’s Canal, it explores the working life of London’s waterways, from the days when canals were vital transport routes to the quieter, more recreational role they play today. The museum focuses on the people and industries that depended on the canals. There are narrowboats to step aboard, displays on cargo and trade, as well as a look at the building’s own past storing imported ice from Norway. It’s compact but well put together, and easy to pair with a walk along the towpath outside. If you’re curious about how goods and communities once moved through the city, it’s a worthwhile stop just off the usual King’s Cross route. I did a video about the ice cream pioneer of Regent’s Canal, Carlo Gatti, and his link to the Canal Museum. Head here to find out more: https://www.tiktok.com/@bowlofchalk/video/7476362546652450070 Two more for the road For something a little off the main circuit, Van Gogh House in Stockwell offers an intimate look at the artist’s early London life, with a small but thoughtful programme of exhibitions. And out in Ealing, Pitzhanger Manor, designed by Sir John Soane, pairs restored historic interiors with contemporary art. Both offer a quieter, more personal alternative to the city’s bigger-name attractions.
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There are many small museums in London that aren’t on every visitor’s radar, and for that matter, many a Londoner. One such museum is The Foundling Museum.  This unique little museum’s story begins back in the early 18th century with a sailor named Thomas Coram, who after a life’s work in the New World of America, had ostensibly returned to London to enjoy a nice quiet retirement. This as you can imagine, was not to be the case. Upon returning to the capital, Coram was appalled by the number of destitute and dying children that literally littered the streets. Not one to rest on his laurels, Coram took it upon himself to rectify the situation and spent the next 17 years campaigning for the establishment of a Foundling Hospital; a place where these children could be brought, cared for and equipped with the necessary tools to see them through adult life and create what was termed 'useful citizens'.  On October 17th, 1739, King George II signed a charter to establish a hospital for the ‘maintenance and education of exposed and deserted young children’. Realising that the fashion for charity and benevolence amongst wealthy aristocrats could greatly help his cause, Coram teamed up with two unlikely champions; the artist and satirist William Hogarth and the composer George Frideric Handel who between them donated paintings and conducted benefit concerts in an effort to raise much needed funds. The Foundling Hospital, thanks to Hogarth became London’s first public art gallery. In 1741, Coram fell out with his own board of governors and ceased his involvement with the hospital, ironically the same year that it received its first foundlings, but he did however succeed in setting up a charitable foundation which is still going strong today. The hospital itself was moved out of London in 1926 and finally closed in 1954 after 250 years of operation having cared for over 25,000 children. Changing its name to the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, the charity continues to help children, young people and their families. The museum, as you would expect, details the fascinating history of the Foundling Hospital and the children who passed through its doors. The collection includes paintings, sculptures, prints and manuscripts as well as a room dedicated to Handel, but perhaps the most poignant items are the foundling tokens. Children brought to the hospital were given new names, so parents or those who deposited the child were required to bring with them a small token, something unique that could be kept safely locked away and only retrieved should a parent wish to re-claim their child. It was a very simple form of identification, but gives an incredibly personal insight in to the lives of those people who deposited children at the Foundling Hospital and how little they had in terms of material possessions. In a way, each child is reduced to a coin, a pin, a thimble or a theatre ticket stub, yet means so much more.  If you’d like to find out more about Thomas Coram and the Foundling Hospital, then the Foundling Museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, and you’ll find it just next to the Brunswick Centre and not surprisingly Coram Fields. The nearest Underground station is Russell Square. In an attempt to create 'useful citizens' many of the boys brought to the hospital joined the military. The Foundling Hospital currently have an exhibition entitled Foundlings at War: Military Bands.  Foundling Hospital Tokens    If you've ever been down (or up) Clerkenwell Road, you would have passed a big gate way just up the hill from Farringdon Road, and if you'd spied it, would have probably thought 'Jeepers ... that looks like it's straight out of a film set ... of a period film of some sort ... like a film that's set ages ago, maybe one that Cate Blanchett's in.' You would be quite correct in this assumption, because it's been there since 1504 and for me is just the tip of the iceberg. The metaphorical iceberg is formed of the rich history of the area that has so many stories, so many facets and such a wide reach spanning centuries, that to write about it here would do it an injustice. Instead, I shall furnish you with a few bits of information and leave it up to you whether you visit or not. Oh yes, the gate is called St John's Gate and looks like this. 
St John's Gate - Clerkenwell
So, in an unsatisfactory nutshell ... up until the point when Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church and began taking away land that belonged to them (often referred to as the Dissolution of the monasteries) much of London (and the rest of the country for that matter) was dotted with huge swathes of land that belonged to various monastic orders. The area around Clerkenwell belonged to the Order of St John, the Hospitallers, whose origins date back to the late 11th century in a role caring for pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem. The gate I just mentioned was a later addition, which lead in to a Priory that included a couple of large halls, dormitories, buttery, refectory, counting house, kitchen, stables, orchards, gardens, fish ponds and unusually for a monastic precinct, an armoury (those pilgrimages often got violent). After the Dissolution, I think Henry VIII used the Priory as a store house before giving it to his daughter Mary, who used it as a private palace. The Order of St John, the Knights Hospitallers, had an unexpected renaissance in the 19th century, when it became apparent that there was little or no provision for the aid of injured people in civilian life, particularly those succumbing to fatal injuries in the work place, at public events or indeed at home. For this reason, in 1877, the St John Ambulance Association was founded, continuing the same ethos that the original order begun, all those centuries earlier. As you know, St John Ambulance still very much exists today, continuing to carry out what the Victorian's called rather aptly 'Ambulance Crusades'. You can uncover this fascinating history over two sites. St John's Gate houses a museum (free to enter, and free to exit) detailing all of this stuff, and if you cross over the road you will find hiding beneath the facade of a reasonably modern building, the 12th century Priory crypt, one of London's few remaining Norman structures along with another small museum, garden and church, which was rebuilt after being completely destroyed in WWII. Also, just as an aside, William Hogarth (well known pictorial chronicler of debauched 18th century London) lived for 5 years in the east tower of St John's Gate, as his father ran a coffee shop there. Samuel Johnson wrote parliamentary reports there long before anyone approached him with the idea of compiling a dictionary, Charles Dickens visited the Jerusalem Tavern which popped up there in 1760 (of course he did) and the west tower currently houses one of the few remaining Tudor spiral staircases in England (although you can only see this if you join one of their tours at 11am or 2.30pm on Tuesdays, Fridays or Saturdays). Also, if that's not enough name dropping, in the 16th century, the Priory housed the office of the Master of Revels (which sounds like a pretty cool job) responsible for licensing and organising all court entertainments and plays, and 30 of William Shakespeare's plays were licensed there. 
St John Priory - Rebuilt Church
St John Priory (Clerkenwell) - 12th Century Crypt
St John Priory - 12th Century Crypt
St John Priory - Cloister Garden
The museum is open from Monday to Saturday (10am - 5pm), so if you're in the area or work nearby then why not pop in.
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