The 20 best museums in the UK in 2026

Where is it? Margate

What is it? Does what it says on the tin: a museum with everything you could possibly want to know about crabs.

Why go? With clever storytelling, cute little doodles and hilarious merch, Margate’s Crab Museum is almost certainly the top crab museum in all the world – not least because it’s probably the only one. And honestly, we don’t need another. Perfection was achieved in 2021 when founders Chase Coley and brothers Bertie and Ned Suesat-Williams created this tiny little space on Broad Street, with its unassuming signage (partly obscured by parked cars). The museum explores everything there is to know about the crustaceans, from the history of their evolution to how their blood is used in medicine to their sexual reproduction – all using hilarious, educational drawings. The decapods are also used to discuss important socio-political themes and human decency in a family-friendly manner with seriously wholesome yet intellectual vibes. Top tip: take a pitstop to the loo. There’s a bonus mini-exhibit inside.  

Entry price: Free

Address: 9 Broad St, Margate, CT9 1EW

Website

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Where is it? Birmingham

What is it? Birmingham’s lavishly interactive, child-targeted science museum opened just after the turn of the millennium and is still going strong today. 

Why go? Yes, there’s an entry fee, but you get a lot of bang for your buck – especially if you have kids, especially if the weather’s decent. Although a couple of decades old, Thinktank is still a relative newbie and is vastly more entertainingly laid out, with much more interactive stuff (that actually still works) than London’s Science Museum. Enjoy drifting through – and playing with – the exhibits, but for little ones the crowning glory is on the top floor. MiniBrum is a soft, padded ‘city’ for under-eights where they can roleplay running the city and generally have a high old time. And so long as it’s not bucketing it down, the Science Garden is pretty much the best playground in Brum, a series of endlessly replayable outdoor games and experiments that are as fun as they are educational.

Entry price: £18.95-£21.95 (adult), £9.95-£12.95 (children)

Address: Millennium Point, Curzon St, Birmingham, B4 7XG

Website

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Where is it? Stoke-on-Trent

What is it? The UK’s last surviving complete Victorian coal-fired pottery factory.

Why go? The skyline of Stoke-on-Trent was once crowded with bottle ovens and kilns. Over 2,000 of the shapely furnaces made the Midlands city – dubbed, fittingly, The Potteries – the ceramics capital of the world. These days under 50 of the structures remain, five of which are at Gladstone Pottery Museum. The filming location for The Great Pottery Throw Down celebrated its 50th anniversary as a museum in 2025 and it remains the greatest physical document of Stoke’s ceramic-making heyday. The Gladstone guides visitors through the roles within a Victorian coal-fired pottery factory, from throwing to firing and decorating, vividly bringing the process to life by allowing you to walk through each factory building (you can even go inside the bottle ovens and peer up towards the chimney). Not only do you get a sense of the scale of Stoke’s pottery history, but you come face-to-face with the experiences of the people who were part of it: the unbearable heat, agonising pain and child labour, but also the immense skill and local pride.

Entry price: £9.10 (adults) £6.30 (children) £7.40 (students and over 65s)

Address: Uttoxeter Rd, Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, ST3 1PQ

Website.

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Where is it? Ramsgate

What is it? A unique collection, housed beautifully in the unlikeliest of places.

Why go? Stumbling across this small brick building on a sunny day in beachside Ramsgate is quite surreal. This dinky backstreet museum, absolutely jammed full of old home computers and video game consoles, is very much a celebration of being indoors. The whole thing is the work of owners Mike and Carol Deer who have been collecting all things plastic and computer-y since the 1970s. The love that’s gone into this place is palpable, and even if you’re not remotely interested in ZX Spectrums or Video Genies you’ll have a great time gawping at all the elegant and rare machines (many saved, by Mike and Carol, from the scrap heap). You can even get hands on with some of the consoles. And, what a bonus: the Micro Museum is just a few doors down from a new venue, This Museum is (Not) Obsolete, which houses a collection of obscure (and experimental) musical technology. Currently it’s only open at weekends, in the afternoons, so be sure to time your visits carefully.

Entry price: £7 (adult or child), under threes go free.

Address: 11 Church Hill, Ramsgate CT11 8RA.

Website

Where is it? Bristol

What is it? A former transit shed tracing 2,000 years of Bristol history.

Why go? No part of Bristol’s DNA is left untouched at M Shed. The relatively young museum on the city’s harbourside is satisfyingly split into three themes: Places, People and Lives. In the Places gallery, you’ll see how the Bristol landscape and demographic has changed over millennia with artefacts like vintage buses, dinosaur remains and a mural mapping out its suburbs. In the Life gallery, you’ll get a glimpse at the daily experiences of people who have called Bristol home and in the People section you’ll be guided through the dozens of things that Bristolians have created, challenged and influenced. M Shed also unabashedly confronts Bristol’s role in the slave trade and houses the statue of slave trader Edward Colston, which was famously toppled during a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest. And it reminds visitors of the Bristol bus boycott of 1963 – a huge turning point in the UK civil rights movement that paved the way for the 1965 and 1968 Race Relations Acts.

Entry price: Free

Address: Princes Wharf, Wapping Rd, Bristol, BS1 4RN

Website

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Where is it? Falmouth

What is it? A Cornish museum dedicated to the seafaring and swashbuckling aspects of nautical life.

Why go? Where better to learn about the ways of life on the oggin than in the gorgeous fishing town of Falmouth? Housed in a bleddy ‘ansum harbourside building, the National Maritime Museum Cornwall (NMMC) has one thing that its Greenwich counterpart doesn’t, and that’s direct access to the ocean. The museum’s underwater Tidal Zone allows visitors to step below sea level and witness the tide rising and falling through two large windows. On certain days you might spot fish, or even see divers cleaning barnacles off the windows. The main galleries not only have a cracking collection of vessels and maritime objects – from Inuit kayaks and RNLI lifeboats to ancient Cornish fishing equipment – but make a fabulous interactive museum that kids and adults will both enjoy. Just don’t leave your sea legs at home.

Entry price: £19 (adult), £12 (students) £10 (children) – all prices for a year

Address: Falmouth, TR11 3QY

Website

Where is it? Blaenavon, Wales

What is it? A retired colliery turned museum on a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why go? Coal mining shaped Welsh life for decades and nowhere can you appreciate that more than at Big Pit. Above ground, the pithead baths building reveals the story of local mining communities, their gruelling daily routines, industry disasters and the role of trade unions, while the mining galleries showcase all sorts of hefty (and rather threatening) digging equipment. But Big Pit’s real highlight is its underground tour. Kitted in a helmet, cap lamp, belt, battery and ‘self rescuer’ (the very same equipment worn by miners), visitors board the pit cage and descend 300 feet into the mineshaft. There, a former miner guides you around the dark meandering tunnels, talking you through the mining process, pointing out the original engine houses and stables that are still down there and sharing their own stories of working in the pit.

Entry price: Free (£5-£8 for tours)

Address: Pontypool, NP4 9XP

Website

Where is it? Manchester, obvs

What is it? A remarkably inclusive, captivating university museum.

Why go? All too often natural history museums can feel stuffy and impenetrable, vast collections of stuff that you need a doctorate in to properly comprehend. Not Manchester Museum. The very presentation of its exhibits feels radical: never patronising, always welcoming and engaging. It doesn’t shy away from the big questions, either. How can we save the planet? What does it mean to be human? Owned by the University of Manchester and designed by Alfred Waterhouse (architect of London's Natural History Museum), Manchester Museum reopened after a grand glow-up in 2023 and looks very sharp indeed. Highlights include live reptiles in the Vivarium, the sperm whale skeleton suspended above the Living Worlds gallery (recently named Harmony), a piece of rubble from the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast, one of Charles Darwin’s finches and, of course, Stan the T-rex.

Entry price: Free

Address: Oxford Rd, Manchester, M13 9PL

Website

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Where is it? Leeds

What is it? The UK’s largest independent medical museum

Why go? What do you mean people once used hearing aids covered in human hair? Or that apothecaries tried to treat epilepsy using the skulls of people who had died violent deaths? Taking visitors through the horrifying practices that our ancestors had to endure, all the way to the miraculous innovations that we now take for granted as well as the issues that we have yet to solve, the Thackray Museum of Medicine is one of the UK’s most expansive explorations of medicine through the ages. Its abundance of stuff on show includes facial prosthetics made for wounded WWI soldiers, a 1903 amputation kit, an early hay fever helmet and Hitler’s emergency blood transfusion kit. We recommend saving the café for the end of your visit – the stroll down Disease Street, a recreation of an infection-riddled Victorian alley (smells and all), might leave you feeling a little queasy.

Entry price: Choose your own price (£9-£16)

Address: 41 Beckett St, Leeds, LS9 7LN

Website

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Where is it? London

What is it? The world’s oldest free-to-the-public museum, as grand and fascinating as it’s ever been.

Why go? We know, we know, there are more than enough guides out there on London museums, but in 2026 the British Museum is particularly worth getting excited about. As well as its usual treasure trove of artefacts and artworks, the gargantuan Bloomsbury institution (which is one of the most visited attractions in the UK) will be host to the Bayeux Tapestry. The masterpiece depicting the Norman Conquest of Britain, which is believed to have been made by nuns in Canterbury, will be back on these isles for the first time in 900 years. Needless to say, it’s going to be a heck of an occasion: not only will the British Museum be transformed into a medieval forest to welcome the artwork but it will be free to visit for millions. This is truly once-in-a-lifetime stuff: there’s a reason we named the exhibition the single best thing to see in the UK in 2026.

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Entry price: Free

Address: Great Russell St, London, WC1B 3DG

Website

Where is it? County Durham

What is it? A portal to northeastern England’s past.

Why go? The moment you walk through the entrance of Beamish, you are submerged in the sights, smells and tastes of days gone by. Actors inhabit the site’s buildings and roam its cobbled streets, playing everything from a 1950s hairdresser (who will actually do your hair) to a Victorian headteacher who will make you recite your times tables. There’s a 1940s farm with real livestock, an old cinema, a fleet of vintage vehicles, a working tramline and a late Victorian village with a department store, bakery, bank, garage, pub, stables and six terrace houses. Pay a visit to Jubilee Confectioners for traditional cinder toffee and boiled sweets, to Middleton’s Traditional Fish and Chips for some Spam fritters or to the Drover’s Tavern for Georgian salmagundi salad. There’s no way that you can cover the whole museum in one trip but, after you’ve visited once, you get free entry for a whole year, so you’ll just have to keep coming back.

Entry price: £35 (adult), £26 (seniors), £20.50 (children 5-16)

Address: Stanley, DH9 0RG

Website

Where is it? Hertfordshire

What is it? A quirky family-friendly time capsule filled with naturalist treasures.

Why go? It’s high time someone made a movie about Lionel Walter Rothschild, the animal-loving eccentric behind this lesser-known Natural History Museum in the painterly-pretty town of Tring. A real-life Dr Dolittle, the banking dynasty scion was more interested in gathering exotic wildlife and clopping around town in a zebra-drawn carriage than finance. His furry, scaled and winged legacy is found inside this magical wardrobe of a Victorian building on the verge of Tring Park, where his emus and wallabies once roamed. There are six galleries covering all the major genus and filled with specimens. It’s not every day you encounter a great auk or Tasmanian tiger – even a stuffed one. I particularly love the viper display on the top floor – many decades deceased and still awe-inspiring. The elephant in the room – okay, elephant seal – is that, once upon a time, all the exhibits were purloined from their native lands and brought back to England. But the vibe here is educational, and there’s enlightenment to be had from gazing at these magnificent, lesser-spotted creatures.

Entry price: Free

Address: The Walter Rothschild Building, Akeman St, Tring, HP23 6AP

Website

Where is it? York

What is it? The past, present and future of rail travel.

Why go? If you’ve got even the vaguest hint of a train nerd in you, the National Railway Museum will draw it out. The NRM both takes you through locomotive history and tells you how the vehicles transformed British society, but its greatest assets are the beasts themselves. Thomas the Tank Engine-style things with cute funnels, trailblazing speed freaks like Mallard – the world’s fastest steam locomotive – and the Japanese shinkansen [bullet train], and everyday heroes like the Intercity 125 all feature. Plenty of the trains you can actually go inside and get a proper sense of what it’s like to travel in them, with one (the Countess of York) even offering afternoon tea. While the NRM is currently in the midst of a grand refurb, it’s very much still worth a visit: the gargantuan Station Hall reopened last year after an £11 million refurb and has never looked better.

Entry price: Free

Address: Leeman Rd, York, YO26 4XJ

Website

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Where is it? Glasgow

What is it? A vast palace of curiosities, entirely free to visit.

Why go? Carved out of Locharbriggs red sandstone (an iconic sight all over Glasgow), Kelvingrove has been a city landmark since 1901. As well as boasting a formidable art collection – with Dalí, Van Gogh, Turner, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and more – the Spanish baroque style institution’s non-art stuff is equally fascinating. The collection is, on the surface, chaotically charming, grounded in Glasgow’s history but sprawling to include Spitfire fighter planes, medieval suits of armour and ancient Egyptian sarcophagi. The Kelvingrove’s exhibits vary wildly but if you spend enough time in the place (and actually read all the exhibition blurbs) you’ll realise how carefully it’s all been curated. The ‘life’ wing, which has most of Kelvingrove’s non-art stuff, slickly takes visitors from prehistory to the present, with a thorough focus on Scottish history and archaeology. My personal favourite is the display of glorious trade union banners in the Stories Gallery: gigantic, blazing, stirring displays of defiance and camaraderie. Oh, and this year Kelvingrove has a new audio guide from the one and only Billy Connolly.

Entry price: Free

Address: Argyle St, Glasgow, G3 8AG

Website

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Where is it? Cardiff

What is it? An open-air museum spanning centuries of Celtic life

Why go? Contained in a 100-acre bubble 11 miles west of Cardiff, St Fagans somehow feels like it goes on forever.  Whatever part of Welsh life you want to know about, in whichever time period, you’re likely to find something on it here. More than 40 historic buildings from across the nations have been re-erected at St Fagans. One moment you’re ducking through the entrance of an Iron Age roundhouse, the next you’re browsing a Victorian grocery store, and the next you’re nosying around a post-World War II prefab home. Its most recent addition is The Vulcan, an 1830s alehouse forced to shut in 2012 but rebuilt at St Fagans in 2024. Now, you can sink a pint there just as Cardiff’s workmen did 100 years ago. Bear in mind – it can be easy to completely miss the Grade I-listed sixteenth century St Fagan’s Castle and its lovely Italian gardens hidden on the west of the site.

Entry price: Free

Address: Cardiff CF5 6XB

Website

Where is it? Oxford

What is it? Half a million years of humanity, across five floors.

Why go? On first visit the Ashmolean can feel a bit labyrinthine – I remember thinking: how the hell do I get upstairs? – but the trick is to completely give yourself over to this world-leading collection of art and archaeology. In its own elegant style (often focusing on form and function rather than strict chronology), the Ashmolean flits between eras and places, covering items from half a million years of human history. The 9,000-year-old Jericho Skull, the Anglo-Saxon Alfred Jewel, a death mask of Oliver Cromwell and the ancient Egyptian Shrine of Taharqa are just a handful of the items that have been collected by this University of Oxford museum since it was founded in 1683. The Ashmolean is another institution on this list that’s as much an art gallery as a museum, containing works by da Vinci and Michelangelo, as well as the planet’s biggest collection of Raphael drawings and a modern art gallery with pieces by Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon, Henri Matisse and more.

Entry price: Free

Address: Beaumont St, Oxford, OX1 2PH

Website

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Where is it? Cambridgeshire

What is it? Heaven for plane geeks.

Why go? Britain’s largest aviation museum is also its best. Just south of Cambridge, Duxford is made up of an airfield and hangars that were a fighter station during the Battle of Britain and World War Two. Initially a storage site for London’s Imperial War Museum, it’s since become an attraction in its own right with five hangars filled with over 200 planes, tanks and boats. If you’re intrigued by military hardware – particularly of the flying sort ­– then Duxford is endlessly fascinating. The first World War One warplanes, all kinds of WWII aircraft, Cold War bombers and reconnaissance planes… you’ll find it all, plus a chance to sit at the controls of a Spitfire Mk I. And Duxford isn’t all military: there’s also a Concorde and several jet airlines. Time your visit to coincide with an air show (find the calendar here) for the full Duxford experience.

Entry price: £28.60 (adults), £11.40-£13.40 (child 5-15), £24.10-£25.70 (concessions)

Address: Duxford, Cambridgeshire, CB22 4QR

Website

Where is it? Dundee

What is it? Scotland’s first design museum and the only V&A branch outside London.

Why go? Looming majestically over the River Tay, the V&A Dundee is a testament to the City of Discovery’s design credentials. Did you know that it’s the birthplace of aspirin, Beano and Dandy comics, orange marmalade and video games like Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto? The museum’s free Scottish Design Galleries houses 300 objects – from an ornately illustrated fifteenth century Book of Hours to a video game designed by Glasgow-based games studio The Secret Experiment in the 2010s. And its special exhibitions are the sort that people would travel several hundred miles for. The headline showcase for 2026 is ‘Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show’ which shows off garments and archival fashion show materials from the likes of Alexander McQueen, Maison Margiela, and Scotland’s own Charles Jeffrey. In 2027, it’s lined up a major show focusing on Vivienne Westwood, her jewellery and her Scottish influence.

Entry price: Free

Address: 1 Riverside Esplanade, Dundee, DD1 4EZ

Website

Where is it? Preston

What is it?  A neoclassical landmark housing an immense collection of art and artefacts.

Why go? After a four-year-long, £19 million renovation, the Harris reopened its doors in September 2025. The wait was well worth it. The 130-year-old Grade I-listed venue relaunched with glimmering new galleries, community facilities, learning spaces, café and shop. In the central foyer, visitors can set their eyes on the newly restored Foucault Pendulum (the UK’s largest), a hypnotic device designed to provide proof that the Earth does indeed rotate on its axis. In the rest of its hallowed halls, discover the 13,500-year-old skeleton of an elk, coins from the Viking Cuerdale hoard, an assortment of ancient Greek pottery and some of the most beautiful scent bottles you’ve ever laid eyes on. This summer, the Harris is putting on a show celebrating the work of Horrible Histories illustrator Martin Brown, whose original drawings will go on display alongside gruesome historical pieces from the museum’s own archive.

Entry price: Free

Address: Preston PR1 2PP

Website

Where is it? Sunderland

What is it? The first publicly owned museum in the UK, outside London.

Why go? Sunderland Museum is nothing if not eclectic. It began gathering items for its collection in 1810 and, two centuries later, has accumulated more than 108,000 objects ranging from Wallace the Lion, a taxidermied big cat who came to Sunderland with so-called ‘African wild beast tamer’ Martini Maccomo in 1868, to the 1986 ‘Sunderland Bluebird’, the very first Nissan car produced in Britain. Elsewhere in its galleries, you might spy an LS Lowry piece, an extremely rare 250-million-year-old fossil of a coelurosauravus (a type of gliding reptile) or the world’s largest collection of pretty pink Sunderland lustreware pottery. The lush winter gardens in the glasshouse next door swarm with more than 2,000 tropical and exotic plants (and a few dinosaurs). Finish your visit with a stroll across its treetop walkway.

Entry price: Free

Address: Burdon Rd, Sunderland, SR1 1PP

Website

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