Around Town

The problem
Agnes, Norwich ‘We visit London quite regularly and know the major museums inside out. Can you suggest some smaller museums worth a look?’

The prescription
London is littered with museums devoted to niche, obscure or just plain eccentric concerns. The Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising in Notting Hill is a kaleidoscopic shrine to one man’s obsession with hoarding biscuit tins, washing powder boxes, royal wedding souvenirs and 10,000 more consumer goods.
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On the other side of town, Dennis Severs’ House in Spitalfields offers time-travel tours through a Huguenot silk-weaver’s house designed to feel as if its eighteenth-century occupants have left mere minutes ago. In Bethnal Green, the V&A Museum of Childhood is fab for kids, showcasing everything from antique dolls to last year’s must-have Christmas toys and offering nostalgia value to children of the ’80s in exhibits such as ‘Star Wars’ and ‘He-Man’ toys. Not far from the British Museum, the Cartoon Museum celebrates The Beano, Dandy, Marvel comics, as well as political illustrators from Hogarth onwards.

The big museums are fine for first-timers in London, but stumbling upon a less prominent attraction makes for immensely satisfying sightseeing. If you’ve already done the Tower of London, bypass the tourists craning their necks for photos of the city’s quaintest bridge and venture up and into the actual towers and walkways of the Tower Bridge Exhibition. Great views of this fair city are also afforded from The Monument, and it’s much cheaper than the London Eye. Just over the river is the Old Operating Theatre Museum, with its gruesome displays of surgical instruments and re-enactments of anaesthesia-free operations, all set in an atmospheric old herb garret.

Do you agree? Post your suggestions for Agnes' day out.

Email your cultural problem to cultureclinic@timeout.com.