Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret

What is it? 

Situated in a herb garret in the roof of St Thomas’s Church in Southwark, the Old Operating Theatre Museum is Britain’s oldest surviving purpose-built operating theatre. Built in 1822 as part of the women’s ward for St Thomas’s Hospital, it predates both anaesthetics and antiseptics, and offers a unique (and often grisly) insight into the history of medicine and surgery. The theatre has been restored with original furniture and equipment, including a nineteenth-century operating table, surgical instruments and pathological specimens. Visitors enter via a vertiginous spiral staircase to view a semicircular operating theatre with tiered viewing seats for up to 150 medical students. The venue’s programme of temporary exhibitions often combine art with explorations of pathology. Be warned, you will have to climb a precarious spiral staircase, but once you’re up there, the whole exhibition takes around 45 minutes to an hour to explore. 

Why go?

To go off the beaten track and be transported back to the dark and fascinating world of nineteenth-century medicine.

Don’t miss

Sanitised reenactments are sometimes held – just as gruesome as the operating tools that look like torture implements – alongside more light-hearted events ranging from craft workshops to comedy nights, while

When to visit

Open Thursday to Sunday 10.30am-5pm. Last admission is 4.15pm. 

Ticket info 

Tickets into the Old Operating theatre are £9 for adults, £7 concessions and £5.50 children. Children under 6 go free and family tickets (two adults, two children or one adult, three children) are £20. 

Time Out tip

Make sure you have time to check out the museum’s gift shop where you can pick up delicious edible delights like olde fashioned brain jam, sugar dusted bogies, liqourice cream leeches and guts and garlic chutney.