Museum of London Docklands

The lowdown

Tucked among the glass towers of Canary Wharf is a low brick Georgian warehouse that once stored sugar and rum from across the empire. Inside is the free Museum of London Docklands, which tells the story of how the river and its docks built the city.

It runs from Roman London on the Thames right through to the building of Canary Wharf, with a reconstructed Victorian dockside alley you can walk down. Its most important room is London, Sugar and Slavery, a clear-eyed free gallery on the city's deep involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, told through the warehouse that profited from it.

It is one of the most atmospheric free museums in town and almost always quiet, the creaking old timbers a world away from the corporate towers two minutes outside. A genuinely overlooked free hour in a part of London most people only pass through for work.