Museum

Lady Wallace's will never forbade lending — that was the trustees' own reading of it, abandoned in 2019 by a Charity Commission order rather than an Act of Parliament. What does bind is a statute of 1992 barring this museum, alone among the national collections, from ever adding or disposing of an object. Hertford House is Grade II; the fountain in front of it is Grade II*.

The portico on Millbank is shut until 2027 and the way in is round the side. Four official names in a hundred and thirty years, Henry Tate's money and what Tate itself has published about it, a Turner bequest that built no almshouses, the flood of 1928, and the restaurant that is now a gallery.

The Science Museum's collections date from 1857 inside the South Kensington Museum and the institution from its formal separation on 26 June 1909. The building is not listed, despite frequent claims otherwise. Stephenson's Rocket left London in 2018 and is now at York, and the Exploring Space gallery closed in 2025.

Tate Modern occupies Giles Gilbert Scott's Bankside power station, a building the state formally declined to protect in 1993. Admission to the collection displays is free. The top-floor viewing level reopened as Level 10 in 2023 after a Supreme Court ruling in favour of the neighbouring residents who overlook it.

The Victoria and Albert Museum began in 1852 as the Museum of Manufactures. The Great Exhibition's surplus bought the eighty-seven-acre South Kensington estate rather than founding the museum, and the Royal Commission that spent it still owns the land. Victoria named the museum in 1899; Edward VII opened the building in 1909, the same day the science collections became a separate museum.

A guide to the cultural and historical highlights of Vienna, including its coffeehouse culture, world-class museums, and iconic landmarks.

Malaga is no longer just the airport: a Roman theatre, the Alcazaba and the Gibralfaro, six museums opened since 2003, and a cathedral whose roof is finally being built.

The classical riding school at Jerez and its performance of How the Andalusian Horses Dance, which runs on set days rather than daily, with the carriage museum and the sherry town around it.

Catalonia's national art museum on Montjuic, holding the largest collection of Romanesque mural painting anywhere. An expansion will close part of it from 2027.

928 nuclear tests between 1951 and 1992, sixty-five miles from the Strip, watched from the hotel roofs as a tourist attraction — and the fallout that went north over Utah.

The Winter Palace was finished in 1762 for an empress who had already died, and the museum inside it began with a collection bought from a Berlin merchant whose first customer could not pay. Two Leonardos, two Raphaels and one Michelangelo sculpture, with three million objects behind them.