Some London boroughs have their own museum devoted to telling the story of the borough's local history. Some of these are very good and a few, quite frankly, aren't.
Before I lay into the borough with the feeblest museum, I should really call out the boroughs who can't be bothered. Yes they have local archives, and yes some host museums the council doesn't pay for, but no borough-funded borough-themed museum exists. Let's name and shame.
Boroughs who can't be bothered to fund a museum
☆ Barnet: No borough museum (since Church Farmhouse closed in 2011)
☆ Camden: No borough museum
☆ Greenwich: No borough museum (since Greenwich Heritage Centre closed in 2018)
☆ Hammersmith & Fulham: No borough museum
☆ Hillingdon: No borough museum
☆ Kensington & Chelsea: No borough museum
☆ Lambeth: No borough museum
☆ Lewisham: No borough museum
☆ Merton: No borough museum
☆ Newham: No borough museum
☆ Tower Hamlets: No borough museum
☆ Wandsworth: No borough museum (closed to save money in 2007)
☆ Westminster: No borough museum
Just under half of boroughs have no museum, which is an unexpectedly high proportion given that the average London borough has a population the same size as Newcastle, Brighton, Derby or Hull. Or it's an unexpectedly low number given that cash-strapped councils are being forced to make savings and culture's an easy non-essential to cut.
There also two boroughs who don't currently have a museum but this should change.
☆ Croydon:Museum of Croydon[Croydon CR9 1ET]
Mildly interactive black vault at Croydon Clocktower, closed for at least two years because the council's in dire financial straits. [review 2009]
☆ Redbridge:Redbridge Museum [Ilford IG1 1EA]
Windowless circuit within Ilford Central Library, due to reopen 'later in 2023' after major revamp. [review 2008]
I'd also like to take Bexley out of the equation, because you can only see "exhibition galleries showcasing objects from the Bexley Museum Collection" if you pay £8 to go on a monthly tour of a historic house, and that's not really how a borough museum ought to work.
☆ Bexley:Hall Place[Bexley DA5 1PQ]
Tudor country house restored in 2008. The splendid grounds remain free to visit. [review 2011]
Which leaves just 16 boroughs with a borough-funded borough-themed museum.
These are the best ones, which definitely wouldn't feature on a 'least impressive' list.
★★★★★ Barking and Dagenham:Valence House Museum[Becontree RM8 3HT, closed Sun, Mon] (free)
15C manor house, refurbished in 2010 and well worth a trip. [review 2012][report 2017]
★★★★★ Ealing/Hounslow:Gunnersbury Park Museum[Acton W3 8LQ, closed Monday] (free)
Three floors of sleek exhibitry across a lottery-restored mansion. [review 2018]
★★★★★ Harrow:Headstone Manor Museum[Headstone HA2 6PX, closed Monday] (free)
14C manor house, beautifully restored and reopened in 2018, plus two big old barns. [review 2018]
★★★★★ Sutton:Honeywood Museum[Carshalton SM5 3NX, open Thu, Fri, Sat] (free)
Restored and reopened in 2012, opposite Carshalton Ponds, with a lovely friendly atmosphere. [review 2012]
These are nearly as good, so also well worth a visit.
★★★★☆ Haringey:Bruce Castle Museum[Tottenham N17 8NU closed Mon, Tue] (free)
Unscrubbed 16C manor house, with numerous unmodernised displays. [review 2007]
★★★★☆ Havering:Havering Museum[Romford RM1 1JU, open Wed, Thu, Fri] (£3)
Volunteer-led displays within part of the ground floor of the former Romford Brewery. [review 2011]
★★★★☆ Kingston:Kingston Museum[Kingston KT1 2PS, open Thu, Fri, Sat] (free)
Old school Surrey museum, heavily featuring moving picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge. [review 2010]
★★★★☆ Richmond:Museum of Richmond[Richmond TW9 1TP, closed Sun, Mon] (free)
Comprehensive historical repository on the second floor of the Old Town Hall.
★★★★☆ Waltham Forest:Vestry House Museum[Walthamstow E17 9NH closed Mon, Tue] (free)
Former workhouse with a focus on transport and the domestic, plus a rather nice small garden.
These three are perfectly decent, it'd just be nice if they were a bit bigger.
★★★☆☆ Brent:Brent Museum[Willesden NW10 2SF] (free)
400 objects housed in an upstairs gallery in the new Willesden Green library.
★★★☆☆ Hackney:Hackney Museum[Hackney E8 1GQ, closed Sun, Mon] (free)
Large ground floor gallery at whatever the library's called these days, with an immigration focus.
★★★☆☆ Islington:Islington MuseumFinsbury EC1V 4NB closed Wed, Sun] (free)]
Modern basement under Finsbury Library, with an artefact-led community focus.
If you're counting, there are just three boroughs left.
The runners-ups are what happens when museums shrink to a few disparate displays in a local library. Southwark at least has the excuse that the Cuming Museum suffered a nasty fire in 2013, whereas Bromley deliberately shut their former building in Orpington and very much slimmed down. They offer a few thematic display cases near the scanners, including a Roman brooch from West Wickham, a Cray Wanderers v Beckenham match programme and David Bowie's customised green corduroy jacket. As for Southwark's heritage hub, this opened inside Walworth Library in 2021 and consists of a small permanent cluster, a temporary exhibition space and a few scattered items amid the bookshelves.
Neither are worth a special visit, but they are at least better than...
London's least impressive borough museum
★☆☆☆☆ Enfield:Museum of Enfield[Enfield EN2 6DS closed Mon] (free)
Unwelcoming rump tucked away inside the Dugdale Centre.
You'd likely not guess that Enfield's borough museum is stashed away inside an arts centre on the gyratory alongside Iceland. But it is, as a few posters in the window sort-of confirm, and if you step inside you won't immediately see it either. Most of the ground floor space is taken up by a cafe, and a decently popular one at that, because the way you lure punters into a public space isn't with artefacts but with coffee and cake. The museum is over on the right behind a curved white wall with the skeleton of a mammoth drawn on it. It's a very narrow space and not especially long either, indeed this photo shows the museum's full extent.
The blurb by the entrance says "The permanent gallery by the Museum of Enfield gives a brief insight into the borough's rich and diverse history", and they're not kidding when they say brief. Only a piddly handful of the "over 20000 items" from the museum's collection are on display, mostly inside small cases with porthole windows at heights a child might have difficulty viewing. The Nature case features five stuffed animals that every borough has, including a fox, a pigeon and a robin. The Home case is quite generic too, while the People case reflects Enfield's diverse communities and is apparently changed annually. If you want to know what the items are you need to scan a QR code to see alist, which is a miserably lazy way to do things and I doubt many visitors bother.
One wall features famous Enfieldians, but no pictures. The floor features a simple spotty Enfield timeline. One corner has clothes for children to dress up in, plus a wildly optimistic hashtag in case they do. The only items of consequence are two Roman coffins, squished in where nobody can clamber over them. This so-called museum has the "that'll do" feel of a token presence, and I doubt the security guards at the front desk sell much from the 'gift shop' either.
There is thankfully more outside, where a space that could have been used for more cafe tables has instead been reserved for temporary biannual exhibitions. The latest, unveiled at the start of the holidays, is called Festival of Industry. It celebrates Enfield's manufacturing heritage, of which there is a great deal, and it's considerably better than the permanent display. There's lots to read and a fair few extra exhibits including companies like Belling, Thorn EMI Ferguson and JW Spears. It's the second exhibition I've seen this month which features a Travel Scrabble set. To see the whole Festival you also need to visit three other libraries because it seems Enfield has a fixation on artefacts in the community. But you do get the feeling that the issue here isn't Enfield's Museum service, it's the blinkered councillor who confined them to this foyer.
Fifteen years ago Enfield decided to move its museum out of Forty Hall, a peripheral mansion, and relocate it to this new council building in the centre of Enfield instead. Forty Hall thus became a much better heritage attraction, indeed that's Enfield's must-visit, but the vast majority of museum items headed straight into storage. More recently the amount of public space in the Dugdale Centre has been significantly reduced by returning the first floor to office space, and all that's left after a two-yearrevamp is this downstairs rump. It is, I think unarguably, London's least impressive borough museum. But it's still better than the non-existent museums 13 other boroughs have, so all credit to the curators who are doing what they can with what little they've got.
