The Most Remarkable Science Museums in England
6 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable science museums in England are Natural History Museum, SS Great Britain and HMS Victory. The list covers 6 science museums. Last updated 14 October 2026.
England was where the Industrial Revolution began and where a seafaring nation built the ships of a global navy, and its science museums keep both stories on a grand scale. Victorian confidence in knowledge produced purpose-built palaces of science in South Kensington, while dry docks in Portsmouth, Bristol and Greenwich preserve real ships whose hulls and engines show how wood, iron and steam carried people across the oceans.
The Natural History Museum fills a Romanesque-style building by Alfred Waterhouse, faced in terracotta modelled with animals and plants, with a blue whale skeleton suspended in its central hall. Next door, the Science Museum holds Stephenson's Rocket and the Apollo 10 command module. In Bristol, Brunel's SS Great Britain, launched in 1843, sits in the dry dock where it was built, the first iron-hulled, screw-driven steamship to cross the Atlantic.
Portsmouth keeps two warships from different centuries. HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar in 1805, remains a commissioned ship of the Royal Navy. The Mary Rose, Henry VIII's warship that sank in 1545, was raised from the Solent in 1982 and now stands in a hall built around its surviving hull. At Greenwich, the Cutty Sark, one of the fastest tea clippers of the 1870s, is raised above its dry dock so visitors can walk beneath its keel.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Natural History Museum | Science museum | |
| 2 | SS Great Britain | Museum ship | |
| 3 | HMS Victory | Museum ship | |
| 4 | Science Museum, London | Science museum | |
| 5 | Mary Rose | Museum ship | |
| 6 | Cutty Sark | Museum ship |
01 Natural History Museum
United Kingdom · 4 km from London51.496° N 0.176° W
Image by DenisDoukhan from Pixabay The building sits on the axis that runs north past Imperial College and the Royal Albert Hall to the Albert Memorial, the cluster of Victorian institutions Londoners nicknamed Albertopolis.
Did you know? Archie, the 8.62-metre giant squid, was caught alive near the Falkland Islands in 2004 and kept undissected in a tank built by the team that made Damien Hirst's.
02 SS Great Britain
United Kingdom · 1.7 km from Bristol51.449° N 2.608° W
mattbuck ( category ) · CC BY-SA 3.0 Next to the ship, Being Brunel, opened in 2018, is a museum devoted to the engineer himself, with his school reports, diaries and drawing instruments and his drawing office restored to its 1850 appearance. The historic dockyard around it includes the Great Western Steamship Company's former dock office.
03 HMS Victory
United Kingdom · 2.1 km from Portsmouth50.802° N 1.110° W
Image by Athena24 from Pixabay The ship stands in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, part of the naval base open to the public, next to the museum of the Tudor warship Mary Rose.
Did you know? In April 1854 she sprang a leak and sank at her moorings in Portsmouth Harbour; everyone aboard was rescued and the ship was raised.
04 Science Museum, London
Science Museum
United Kingdom · 3.9 km from London51.498° N 0.175° W
Photograph by Mike Peel ( www.mikepeel.net ). · CC BY-SA 4.0 Upstairs, the Winton mathematics gallery, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, has a working Difference Engine No. 2 built by the museum to Charles Babbage's design and completed in 1991. The medical galleries on the first floor, opened in 2019 with thousands of objects from Henry Wellcome's collection, trace medicine from antiquity to today, and the Clockmakers' Museum, the oldest collection of its kind, has found a home here. Wonderlab, with live experiments and shows, is among the most popular galleries.
05 Mary Rose
United Kingdom · 1.9 km from Portsmouth50.800° N 1.107° W
Geni · CC BY-SA 4.0 The museum that now encloses her, designed by Wilkinson Eyre with Perkins+Will and opened in 2013, is built directly over the dry dock, and shows most of the recovered objects in context with the hull itself, so the finds are seen beside the timbers of the ship they came from. More than 26,000 finds were raised: bronze and iron guns, 172 longbows and thousands of arrows, the barber-surgeon's chest with his instruments, fiddles and pipes, games, clothing, combs and the personal belongings of the crew. The bones of 179 people were found, and faces of several crewmen have been reconstructed. The skeleton of Hatch, the young terrier-cross kept aboard to catch rats, is displayed too.
06 Cutty Sark
United Kingdom · 7.9 km from London51.483° N 0.010° W
Image by jeffwallis from Pixabay On board you can go down into the holds where tea and wool were once stowed and walk the deck beneath the restored rigging. The gallery under the ship holds what is described as the world's largest collection of ship figureheads, given to the ship's society in 1953. She is a Grade I listed monument and part of the National Historic Fleet, and she usually flies the signal flags JKWS, her call sign in the International Code of Signals.
Did you know? Racing Thermopylae in 1872, she lost her rudder in a storm; her carpenter built a new one aboard in six days, and she finished a week behind.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most remarkable science museums in England?
- On our list, Natural History Museum ranks first, followed by SS Great Britain and HMS Victory.
- Why was the Mary Rose so well preserved?
- When the ship sank in 1545 it settled on its side and the starboard half was quickly buried in soft Solent silt, which kept out the organisms that eat wood. That half, with thousands of objects, was raised in 1982.
- Is HMS Victory still in commission?
- Yes. HMS Victory is the oldest naval ship still in commission in the world and serves as the flagship of the First Sea Lord, while sitting in dry dock in Portsmouth.
- Who designed the Natural History Museum building in London?
- Alfred Waterhouse designed it in a Romanesque style, and it opened in 1881. Its facade and interiors are covered in terracotta tiles moulded with animals and plants.
- How many science museums are on this list in England?
- The list covers 6 science museums.