Best art galleries in London

The artist formerly known as the Tate Gallery, Tate Britain is one of London's most renowned repositories of modern and contemporary art, its classical portico and dome almost as beloved as the treasures it holds inside. Step into its hushed galleries, and you'll find a wealth of artistic inspiration just waiting to be absorbed! We’re talking some of the UK’s most celebrated art from some of its most renowned painters, sculptors, photographers, and so on. Ever wanted to get up close to pieces by Hogarth, Turner and Tracey Emin? Tate Britain has your back.

Pro-tip: bag a Go City London pass to unlock a one-hour guided discovery tour of the gallery’s highlights.

Tate Britain's hip younger sibling, the Tate Modern sits on the south bank of the Thames, its industrial-age brick facade and towering chimney providing a cool counterpoint to the soaring dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, just across the river. Foregoing traditional artists and styles, the Tate Modern instead focuses on the weird and wonderful creations that modern technology (and sensibilities) have created. You'll find darkened rooms with projected videos, bizarre sculptures that reveal themselves through perspective, and enough surrealism to shake a strange stick at. Not to mention the massive Turbine Hall, which has hosted large-scale installations from the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor and Ai Weiwei. You can of course, also seek out more ‘traditional’ art from the likes of Warhol, Dali and Picasso. So, if you're looking to have your mind blown, get yourself down to the Tate Modern. And – top news! – there’s a guided tour available for this one, too.

You probably don’t need an excuse to visit Buckingham Palace while in London, but here’s one for you anyway. The ridiculously lavish King’s Gallery (formerly known as the Queen’s Gallery while dear old ma/grandma was still with us) contains – no surprises here – one of the largest and most valuable collections of private art anywhere on the planet, amassed over a period of hundreds of years. Exhibits rotate between here and various other royal palaces, but at any given time you might expect to be able to peer at pieces from Rembrandt, Rubens, van Dyck, Vermeer, da Vinci, Hogarth and more, as well as an extensive collection of Italian Renaissance drawings and grand portraits of monarchs past. In short: quite the embarrassment of artistic riches.

All those graceful masterpieces sound a little too… stuffy for your liking? Then you might be better served by the Moco Museum in Marble Arch, where Old Masters are eschewed in favor of bold visionary works by the likes of Banksy, Basquiat, Warhol, Kusama and Keith Haring. There are around 100 eye-popping pieces to explore here, spanning sculpture, street art and sits-specific installation, each sure to earn itself a place in your Insta reels.

No ordinary gallery, the historic Guildhall contains not only an extensive collection of  17th-century portraiture, Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces and eclectic Victorian art, but also the remains of an actual Roman amphitheatre, which you can view beneath the main galleries. Much of the art elsewhere here connects back to London itself, with large-scale pieces depicting Great Fires, Frost Fairs and the like. It also places you within ambling distance of one of the city’s great pieces of architectural art – the mighty St Paul’s Cathedral – also well worth a visit while you’re in the area.

Ok, this one’s not strictly a gallery, but we’re including it here as it’s as close to the Sistine Chapel as you’re likely to find in the UK. Bonus: it also places you on the doorstep of a wealth of other Greenwich attractions (the Royal Observatory, Cutty Sark and Greenwich Park, to name just a few). Anyway, if you want to ogle the baroque bobby dazzler that is Sir James Thornhill’s Painted Hall, you should get yourself down to the Old Royal Naval College and prepare to put significant strain on your neck as you gaze skywards at the epic murals adorning the ceilings.

But, if you're in the mood for something more timeless, you can't do much better than the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. Featuring over 2,000 paintings from the 13th to the 19th Century, it's an absolute feast for the eyes. Some of the world's most recognisable paintings live right here within its walls, including Seurat's Bathers in Asnières, van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, Rubens’ Samson and Delilah, Turner’s Fighting Temeraire, Constable's Hay Wain and Botticelli’s Mars and Venus. So, if you want to be transported back to what many consider the golden age of art – for free, no less! – this is surely the one for you.

Here’s an option you might want to consider if you’ve got easily distracted kids in tow but still want to immerse yourself in a bit of the good stuff. And immerse you certainly will at Frameless, where complete immersion in some of the art world’s most famous paintings is very much the name of the game. Famous masterpieces are brought to life in glorious technicolor – think van Gogh’s Starry Night transformed to a twirling, swirling, living celestial display, or Kandinsky’s canvases rendered as three-dimensional light projections. The whole thing is soundtracked by a heart-swelling contemporary musical score, adding to the drama of each and every brushstroke. It’s art like you’ve never experienced it before.