Five of our Favourite Museums for Finding Awe and Wonder
Where do you go to locate awe and wonder? For us, it’s often a museum; that combination of the architecture of the space, the works in the galleries, the storytelling of the displays and exhibitions, and the people sharing the experience with us (plus the cafe and bookshop, of course).
A visit to a museum can be one of those everyday adventures that helps inspire us in our everyday lives and feeds our curiosity.
Here’s a round-up of five museums in London that we recently visited when we needed a life pick-me-up when all the things got a little too much.
Just the central atrium space on entering The Design Museum’s new home on Kensington High Street brings pause enough; but then the journey through approximately 1000 objects in Designer Maker User, the permanent collection display that contains everything from typewriters to roadsigns, is the experience we need to stimulate our (often neglected) creative minds.
For us, The Design Museum, one of the world’s leading museums on design and architecture, helps us to pay attention, to notice the details, the choices, that shape the things we use daily. The story of how we work, how we connect, and how we live our lives is told within these galleries (and sometimes it’s an odd sensation to look back on past iterations and realize that for a moment the promise they held was the future).
Look out for exhibitions that explore sensation in The World of ASMR, social and environmental issues in the work of Bethany Williams, and colour and play in the installations of Yinka Iloria.
A museum to break your heart and put it back together again: From the very first wall that reminds you that ‘Heathcliff was a foundling. Harry Potter was fostered… and Han Solo was adopted’, to the display of tokens that allowed a parent to reclaim a child, the Foundling Museum reveals the intimate stories behind the UK’s first children’s charity. Founded as a place for abandoned and neglected children by Thomas Coram, London’s first and only foundling hospital opened in 1939 (it took 17 years to raise the funds). Though the hospital has long closed, its purpose is still vital. As the current director, Caro Howell recently said, “This museum is unlike any other museum in the world, because for care-experienced young people, who have experienced such isolation and grown up without family, this museum gives them ancestry.”
But the museum also tells another story, one of artists and philanthropy; this was England’s first public art gallery (and a precursor to the Royal Academy) and artists (including William Hogarth, Charles Dickens and George Frideric Handel) created works to bring the public into its spaces. Today, The Foundling Museum celebrates the impact artists have had on children’s lives for over 270 years, from continuing to work with vulnerable young people to creating newly commissioned pieces that speak to the history of the museum itself (by artists such as Yinka Shonibare and Michael Craig-Martin).
Look out for the exhibition Superheroes, Orphans & Origins: 125 years in Comics.
We’ve often lost ourselves down the corridors of the V&A. For a time we were lucky enough to work close by and visit in our lunch hour – walking its many galleries, room by room, over years (though always finding ourselves back in the fashion galleries). The building in which the V&A is housed itself inspires awe, but it’s the vast collection spanning 5000 years of history and 1.2 million objects that inspires wonder. There’s Michelangelo’s David, Grayson Perry’s vases, Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs, Alexander McQueen’s evening dresses and William Morris wallpaper, as well as ceramics from China, a theatre and performance collection and even a Glastonbury Festival Archive. And it’s all free to visit.
Now with a site in Dundee, a collection in Stoke on Trent, galleries in China, and future new London locations the Young V&A and the V&A East, this cultural behemoth continues to enthrall. For a taste of its magic wherever you are, watch the V&A film’s Creativity: It’s What Makes Us, or book a spot on one of their many online programs.
An exhibition to look out for Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear. An event to attend: Friday Late.
Tate Modern, always. Is there anywhere else like the Turbine Hall? Or the repurposed industrial tanks? Or the view from the iconic Lightbox on Level 6? Since it opened in May 2000, Tate Modern has dominated London’s cultural life and the South Bank. But though the building exists on a monumental scale, the artworks offer a more intimate experience: we recommended finding spaces away from the crowds (particularly in the permanent collection displays) and trying some techniques for Slow Looking.
Seek out Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room and the artist’s Infinity Rooms, Lubaina Himid’s theatrical exhibition and Magdalena Abakanowicz’s woven sculptures. Participate in the Drawing Bar. And lose yourself in the wonder of modern and contemporary art (even if you don’t fully understand it).
What does home mean to you? This museum can help you reflect on that question.
Tracing how our homes have changed over a period of 400 years, this museum looks at how they are more than the spaces in which we play out our lives, but also hold emotional meanings around ideas of belonging, safety, and mental wellbeing. The Rooms Through Time Display traces a single room – the main living space – and how it evolved in middle-class households from 1630 to today offering a fascinating insight into how the way we organize our lives, our families, and our work, has changed dramatically in that period. Moving from a hall where all the household (including servants) ate together to a loft-style apartment in 1998, we get glimpses of lives once lived as well as some nostalgic moment’s along the way (like remembrances of our grandparent’s house).
Located in a row of former almshouses (whose architectural lines are traced in gold on the floor) in Hoxton, the Museum of Home reopened in 2021 (though it has existed in some form on the site since 1914) after a rebrand and refurbishment, so it’s definitely worth a visit even if you think you know it. Though on a domestic scale, there’s wonder to be hand exploring the spaces and witnessing just how much life has changed and continues to change, and how that’s impacting us – rightly or wrongly - on a daily basis.
Look out for the Museum’s Festival of Sleep and the Great Pajama Party.
Where would you add to this list? Which museums do you visit for bringing more awe and wonder to your everyday life? Let us know the places that you’d recommend we add to our guide for life.
