Some museum objects are beautiful, some are historically important, and a few are strange enough that you will still be describing them to people weeks later. The ten below are all real, all on public display somewhere in the UK, and each one earns the journey on its own. Several sit in small, university-run or volunteer-run museums with limited opening hours, so check the website before you set off.
A word on expectations: these are not blockbuster exhibits with lighting rigs and films. They are odd, quiet, occasionally grim things in cases — which is exactly why they stick.
The overstuffed walrus, Horniman Museum, London
Frederick Horniman bought his walrus in the 1890s, and the taxidermist who mounted it had, according to the story the museum tells, never seen a live one. Working from a skin and a rough idea, he packed the animal so solidly that it looks inflated — a barrel with tusks. Real walruses are baggy, wrinkled and equipped with a throat that can balloon; this one is a smooth, overstuffed pillow.
It sits in the natural history gallery at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, 100 London Road, Forest Hill, London SE23, and has become a small celebrity: a monument to the gap between what we assume nature looks like and what it actually looks like. Entry is free, and the same building holds an aquarium, a remarkable collection of musical instruments and gardens with views over London.
A jar of moles, Grant Museum of Zoology, London
The Grant Museum is part of University College London, tucked into the Rockefeller Building on University Street, WC1E. It is a surviving Victorian teaching collection: essentially one room of glass cases and handwritten labels, assembled for students rather than visitors. Its unlikely modern star is a glass jar packed with a dozen or so moles preserved in fluid, stacked together like sweets.
Look past the moles and you find a quagga skeleton — one of only a handful left in the world — a thylacine, and the Micrarium, a backlit wall of thousands of microscope slides, most of them made from very small animals. Entry is free, but opening days are limited, and it tends to close during university holidays.
The Irish giant and a prime minister's dentures, Hunterian Museum, London
The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, on Lincoln's Inn Fields, WC2A, reopened in 2023 after a long refurbishment and holds the collection of the eighteenth-century surgeon John Hunter. Two objects here are worth the trip on their own.
The first is the skeleton of Charles Byrne, an Irishman who came to London as a curiosity, stood roughly 2.3 metres tall and died in 1783. Hunter acquired the body, and Byrne's remains have been at the centre of a long argument about whether they should be buried rather than displayed. Check the museum's current position before making a special journey.
The second is a set of dentures made for Winston Churchill, with gold mounts, designed to preserve his distinctive way of speaking. Two rooms away from thousands of anatomical specimens, they land as unexpectedly funny and entirely human.
Burke's skeleton and a pocketbook bound in his skin, Edinburgh
Surgeons' Hall Museums on Nicolson Street, EH8, charge a modest admission fee and hold the pathology collection of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. William Burke was hanged in 1829 for his part in the murders carried out with William Hare, whose victims were sold for dissection. His skeleton is displayed, along with his death mask, and a small pocketbook said to have been bound in his skin. Whether or not you accept that claim, it is the sort of object that makes you read every label in the room.
The surrounding collection is serious medicine, which puts the ghoulish bits in context. Allow two hours, and note that the National Museum of Scotland is a ten-minute walk away — an easy pairing for a single afternoon.
Seventeen tiny coffins from Arthur's Seat, National Museum of Scotland
In 1836, boys hunting for rabbits on the slopes of Arthur's Seat found a small opening in the rock. Inside were miniature coffins, each containing a carved wooden figure dressed in cloth. Seventeen were found.
Theories have multiplied ever since: a memorial to the victims of Burke and Hare, a charm made by sailors, an elaborate joke by a group of boys. Only a handful survive, and they are displayed at the National Museum of Scotland on Chambers Street, EH1, where entry is free. They take two minutes to look at and about twenty to think about. Dolly the sheep is in the same building, if you want a change of mood.
The Hand of Glory, Whitby Museum, North Yorkshire
Whitby Museum in Pannett Park, YO21, holds a dried, preserved human hand — a Hand of Glory. Folklore held that a hand treated in a particular way, with candles fixed between the fingers, could freeze the people inside a house while a thief worked undisturbed; the spell failed only if someone in the house was awake. It is one of a small number said to survive in Britain, and it is displayed with an admirably straight face.
There is a small admission charge. The museum is worth a longer visit for its fossils and its Whitby jet, and the town supplies the abbey ruins, the 199 steps and the Dracula connection.
Guy Fawkes' lantern and the Great Bed of Ware
At the Ashmolean Museum on Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1, entry is free, and one of the strangest objects on show is also one of the plainest: a small lantern of iron and horn, said to be the one Guy Fawkes carried in the cellars beneath the House of Lords on the night of 5 November 1605. It was kept by the family of Sir Thomas Knyvet, the man who arrested him, and it now sits within sight of objects far more valuable. That contrast is the point. Relics are usually ordinary things caught in extraordinary circumstances.
For the same reason, seek out the Great Bed of Ware at the V&A on Cromwell Road, London SW7. Made around 1590 for an inn in Hertfordshire and carved all over, including with the initials of some of the people who slept in it, it was famous enough to be mentioned in plays of the period. A bed that became a tourist attraction in its own right is, in miniature, the history of the museum that now houses it.
Practical notes for an oddity tour
- Check opening days first. University and volunteer-run museums often open four or five days a week, sometimes only in the afternoon, and close during holidays.
- Budget for the small places. National museums such as the V&A, the Ashmolean, the National Museum of Scotland and the Horniman are free. Independent and medical museums usually charge a modest fee.
- Group by city. London can cover the Hunterian, the Grant Museum and the V&A in a day if you plan the route; in Edinburgh, Surgeons' Hall and the National Museum of Scotland are close enough to walk between.
- Ask the staff what to look for. In small collections, the strangest object is rarely the one with the biggest label.
- Read the provenance. Who owned the thing, how it reached the museum, and what the museum now thinks about displaying it — that is usually the real story.
- Take a break if you need one. Several of these collections include human remains and can be upsetting. Stepping out of a gallery is always allowed.
Two more for the list if you catch the habit: the Dog Collar Museum at Leeds Castle in Kent, which traces centuries of collars made for dogs, and the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, whose charms and poppets are displayed as objects of belief rather than props.
Photo: StockSnap / Pixabay
