The Keeping Habit
7 stops · 1 h 50 min · 4.3 km
Within half a mile, Georgian and Victorian London built a machine for collecting, classifying and keeping things — and then applied it to children. Seven stops from a teaching collection that was shut to the public for 168 years, through a hospital where mothers left a coin or a scrap of fabric so a child could be matched if they ever came back, to a collection that was itself destroyed in a night in 1941. Told from the pavement, so it works whether the doors are open or not. About an hour and three-quarters, tube at both ends, and it walks from either one.
Walk it either way
There is a station at each end, so this walk works in both directions — the guide reorders the route and retells the stops to match the way you are going.
- University Street → Lincoln's Inn Fields
- Lincoln's Inn Fields → University Street
Stops on this walk
- 1Grant Museum of Zoology
- 2Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology
- 3Foundling Museum
- 4Foundling Hospital Gate and Coram's Fields
- 5The British Museum
- 6Sir John Soane's Museum
- 7Hunterian Museum
How this walk works
Wanderful is an audio guide that knows where you are. Start this walk and it speaks as you reach each stop — no reading a map, no hunting for the next number on a sign. Put your phone in your pocket and listen.