Grant Museum of Zoology

The lowdown

The Grant is UCL's zoology museum, one cramped Victorian room near Euston packed floor to ceiling with around sixty-eight thousand specimens, and it is gloriously, atmospherically old-school. Skeletons hang overhead, jars of preserved creatures line the cases, and it is all free.

It has cult objects. A jar of moles, all crammed together, that the internet fell in love with. The skeleton of a quagga, a half-zebra hunted to extinction, one of only a handful left in the world. And the Micrarium, a tiny mirrored alcove with two thousand microscope slides backlit on the walls, a glowing little shrine to the smallest animals.

It is run by a university rather than a big institution, so it feels personal and curious rather than slick, the sort of free hidden gem that the people who know about it get quietly evangelical over.