Faraday Museum
The free museum of the Royal Institution in Mayfair, where Michael Faraday's original basement laboratory survives, the room where electromagnetism and much of modern science was born.
FREE
The lowdown
Behind a smart Mayfair facade lies the Royal Institution, one of the most important scientific addresses in the world, and its Faraday Museum is free. Down in the basement is the actual laboratory where Michael Faraday made the discoveries about electricity and magnetism that underpin the modern electrified world.
The lab has been preserved with his benches and apparatus, and around it the museum tells the story of more than two centuries of science done in this building, where a remarkable number of chemical elements were discovered and where the famous Christmas Lectures still take place.
It is compact, free and genuinely awe-inspiring if you let it land, the idea that so much of how we live was worked out in this one quiet Mayfair basement. A short, rich free visit for anyone with a flicker of curiosity about how the world works.
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