Where to go in London when it rains

The useful thing about a wet afternoon in London is that almost everything worth doing indoors costs nothing. Almost all the big museums are free, and that includes the permanent collections at the ones people assume are ticketed.

The obvious ones, and why they are still right

The Natural History Museum has the blue whale and the earthquake room, and is the one to take a child to. Tate Modern is free, enormous, and open until nine on a Friday and Saturday. Neither needs booking on a weekday.

The ones that are never full

Sir John Soane’s Museum is a house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields packed to the ceiling with what one man collected, and it is free. So is the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road, which has a reading room worth an afternoon on its own. The Museum of the Order of St John is a Tudor gatehouse in Clerkenwell and you will likely have it to yourself.

Undercover but not indoors

Leadenhall Market is a Victorian arcade with a roof on it, so you can walk the whole thing dry, and it is empty at weekends. Coal Drops Yard at King’s Cross is the same idea with better coffee.

Everything above is on the free listings, which is dated and rebuilt as things change. If it has stopped raining, what is on tonight is the page you want.