Petrie Museum
A cramped, wonderfully old-fashioned free museum at UCL holding one of the world's greatest collections of Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology, around eighty thousand objects in dense glass cases.
FREE
The lowdown
Hidden in a side street of the UCL campus is one of the greatest collections of Egyptian archaeology anywhere, and it is free. The Petrie Museum holds around eighty thousand objects, gathered largely by the pioneering archaeologist Flinders Petrie, crammed into dense old-fashioned glass cases.
Where the British Museum shows the grand and the golden, the Petrie shows the everyday, tools, pottery, jewellery, the world's oldest dress, fragments of ordinary lives from thousands of years ago along the Nile. It is intimate and scholarly rather than slick, the sort of place archaeology students fall in love with.
It is small, slightly eccentric and gloriously uncommercial, the kind of free hidden gem you leave feeling you have been let in on a secret. Bring your curiosity and take your time.
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