Museums around South Kensington

South Kensington packs two great museums and a famous concert hall into a few minutes on foot, and the walk ends in the park behind them, at a palace where a queen was born.

The museums here are free to enter, so you can go into one properly and only glance at the next. Take your time at the first stop.

Start with the Victoria and Albert Museum, which began in 1852 as the Museum of Manufactures and was meant to teach designers what good work looked like. The building on Cromwell Road, by Aston Webb, was finished in 1909.

Go in for the Cast Courts, where a full-size plaster copy of Michelangelo's David stands beside a cast of Trajan's Column. Then leave towards the museum next door.

The Natural History Museum opened in 1881 in a Romanesque building by Alfred Waterhouse. Look at the walls before you enter: they are covered in terracotta tiles, chosen because they stood up to Victorian London's soot.

Inside, Hintze Hall is dominated by Hope, a blue whale skeleton about 25 metres long, which took Dippy the Diplodocus's place in 2017. Stand under it, then walk north to the hall.

Queen Victoria opened the Royal Albert Hall on 29 March 1871, in memory of her husband. From the street it is a huge oval, and a terracotta frieze runs around its outside, 800 feet long, titled The Triumph of Arts and Sciences.

The BBC Proms have been held here every summer since 1941. Walk around the outside to read the frieze; tours cover the auditorium for those who want to go in.

Cross Kensington Gardens to Kensington Palace. William and Mary bought it in 1689, when it was a house called Nottingham House, and Christopher Wren enlarged it. Princess Victoria was born here in 1819.

The State Rooms are open to visitors. Look for William Kent's painted King's Staircase, and the Orangery, built for Queen Anne in 1704.

You started with objects made to be copied, passed the natural world under a terracotta facade, and finished among the rooms of a royal house.