South Kensington is London's museum district and one of the great urban legacies of the Victorian age — Prince Albert's vision of a quarter dedicated to culture and education, built on the profits of the 1851 Great Exhibition. Three of the country's finest museums sit within a five-minute walk of each other, and all are free.
The Victoria and Albert Museum on Cromwell Road holds the world's greatest collection of decorative arts. Next door, the Natural History Museum sits behind Alfred Waterhouse's terracotta Romanesque facade — a cathedral to evolution that draws long queues of children. Around the corner on Exhibition Road, the Science Museum covers space, medicine, computing, and Victorian engineering. A pedestrianised section of Exhibition Road links them all.
The streets to the south and west — Onslow Gardens, Queen's Gate, Pelham Crescent — are a textbook of stucco-fronted Victorian terraces, blindingly white in sunshine. Hyde Park and the Royal Albert Hall sit just to the north. South Kensington tube station, on the District, Circle, and Piccadilly lines, has a tiled pedestrian tunnel that emerges right at the museums — one of the most useful pieces of Victorian transport infrastructure in the city.