Every American visitor in London should be aware that several top attractions — the British Museum (sculptures from Athens' Parthenon, the Rosetta Stone, monumental totems from Easter Island), the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum — offer free admission, a major act of British magnanimity. It is possible to fill a rich week of touring without spending a cent.
But very few are aware that numerous lesser-known museums of London are also free of admission charge, even though they display major achievements in history, art and culture.
Here are several free museums that you'll want to include on your cost-conscious schedule of sightseeing:
● The British Library (www.bl.uk) is probably the most stunning of all of London's lesser-known museums. Among its treasures on view to all: two of the four known copies of the Magna Carta, musical scores in Mozart's own hand, fragments of Bible manuscripts from the year 50 and the Beatles' draft of the lyrics to "I Want to Hold Your Hand."
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● The Bank of England Museum is an exhaustive overview of the illustrious history of the great British financial institution, enlivened by eye-popping exhibits such as a 1-million-pound note (printed for internal bookkeeping) and a real gold bar that kids are invited to try to lift.
● The Hunterian Museum collects and displays freakish medical oddities such as Winston Churchill's gold dentures, an 18th-century dissection table still bearing knife scars, and nearly 3,000 glass jars of ghoulish animal and human remains, many originally obtained by grave robbers.
● Directly across the square, the haunted-feeling Sir John Soane's Museum (www.soane.org), unchanged since 1837, comprises two creaking town houses overstuffed with art and antiquities collected by its namesake. You can barely move for the sarcophagi.
● Museum of London (www.museumoflondon.org.uk) is a slickly presented storehouse for a dizzying range of fascinating artifacts from the city's past, ranging from elephant skulls to a leather pail used to fight the Great Fire of 1666. The lavish Lord Mayor's stagecoach, carved in 1757, makes Cinderella's look like a Chevy.
● The National Maritime Museum (www.nmm.ac.uk) sounds boring, but it's anything but, since exhibits need be only tangentially boat-related. Highlights among this rambling, kid-friendly place include a pocket watch of a Titanic passenger (stopped at 3:07 a.m.) and the blood-stained clothing worn by Admiral Lord Nelson (whose statue is atop the column in Trafalgar Square) on the day of his death in 1805.
● The Natural History Museum (www.nhm.ac.uk), packed with dinosaur bones and stuffed animals, is among the world's biggest of its genre. Its gorgeous, cathedral-like building, coated with terra-cotta creatures, might be the most beautiful museum facility in the world.
● Around the corner, the cavernous Science Museum (www.sciencemuseum.org.uk) contains an embarrassment of riches when it comes to important machines, including the Apollo 10 command module, a 1950 computer by pioneer Alan Turing and the world's oldest known steam engine.
● The Wallace Collection (www.wallacecollection.org) is the legacy of a ridiculously rich art-collecting family, which often outbid the more famous National Gallery to secure the works it now displays in the family's former Marylebone mansion, off Oxford Street. The courtyard cafe makes for a lovely break.
With the current poor rate for exchanging U.S. dollars into British pounds, the ability to go sightseeing for free is an important benefit that partially offsets the current high cost of London's hotels and meals.
