The Science Museum on Exhibition Road in Kensington is one of those museums kids will love going to. Its exhibits are hands on with plenty of interactivity and there’s lots of cool things that kids like on display such as real space capsules, planes, engines, technical stuff from ships and boats, and things to get young minds thinking.

It became the Science Museum in 1885, taking exhibits from other museums and now has over 300,000 items in its collection including Stevenson’s Rocket and the first jet engine.

The museum is spread over seven floors of its huge building and has numerous galleries on each floor. Some of the highlights include Making the Modern World on the ground floor explaining how technology changed the way we live, this is where they have the Apollo 10 command module. There’s an IMAX 3D cinema on the ground floor showing a selection of movies, currently including Sharks 3D, Deep Sea 3D and Space Station 3D.

The second floor has a gallery called Computing:A History of with examples of some of the earliest attempts at making computers, through the 50’s and 60’s up to the present. The one on the right is the last working model of a Pegasus a valve-based computer, where small glass vacuum tubes are used as electronic switches.

Flight is another popular gallery on the third floor, full of early planes and flying machines. On the fourth and fifth floors the exhibitions are focusing on medicine, medical history and psychology. Throughout the rest of the museum you’ll find galleries on topics such as weather, time, telecommunications, mathematics, marine engineering and many other’s.

One of the newest features in the Science Museum is the Wellcome Wing , which is all about contemporary science and technology and lets you go into a virtual world through sound and vision.

Admission and location

The Science Museum is free to enter and is open 7 days a week from 10am-6pm. It’s closed from 24-26 December. The nearest tube is South Kensington - follow the signs along the underground tunnel rather than exiting the station right at South Ken, they’ll take you under the Cromwell Road and bring you up right next to the Science Museum.