Lifts that exist, floors you can turn on, and somewhere to sit down afterwards. The rainy day criteria change completely once you are pushing something.
16 August 2026 · 3 min read
A pram reorganises London. Places you liked become places with a staircase in them. The step down into the pub, previously invisible, is now the entire character of the pub.
And rain makes it worse, because the fallback plan for a wet afternoon with a small person is usually somewhere with a queue outside it, and queueing in the rain with a pram is how you end up back at home at two in the afternoon having achieved nothing.
So this is the same city judged on different criteria: a lift that goes where you need it, floor space wide enough to turn round in, tolerance for noise, and somewhere to sit at the end.
One honest caveat before the list. Everything below is read off what each venue publishes, so treat it as a good starting point rather than an inspection. If a working lift is the difference between the day happening and not happening, ring ahead.
Free, South Kensington, dinosaurs and a blue whale.
Enormous halls, wide routes, and a subway from the station that means you can arrive without going outside, which on a wet day is worth more than any exhibit. It is busy at weekends in a way that is genuinely difficult with a pram, so go on a weekday morning if your life allows it.
Free, South Kensington, and reachable by the same tunnel.
Wider and flatter than its neighbour, with more space between things. Small children mostly ignore the actual science and enjoy the scale of the rooms, which is a perfectly good reason to go.
Free, South Kensington, and the third of the three.
Quieter than the other two, because it is the one visitors are least likely to have on the list. The courtyard is a loss on a wet day but the interior is vast, warm, and full of the kind of shiny objects that hold a baby's attention for surprisingly long.
Free, King's Cross, with original manuscripts in a room off to the side.
The reason it is here is the ground floor: a big, calm, heated space with a cafe in it and enough room to park a pram without apologising to anyone. You can look at a Beatles lyric sheet and a Magna Carta in twenty minutes and spend the other two hours sitting down.
Covent Garden, and full of buses and tube carriages that children are allowed to climb into.
Not free, and worth it. It is one of the few museums in London designed from the start around small people touching things, and the layout assumes prams rather than tolerating them.
Bloomsbury, telling the story of Britain's first children's charity through Hogarth paintings and the tokens mothers left with their babies.
Be warned that the tokens are genuinely upsetting, and that having a very small child asleep on you while reading them is a particular experience. It is also quiet, warm, rarely busy and quite small, which are four things you want.
Free, Forest Hill, with an overstuffed walrus and an aquarium.
Further out than everything else here, and the reward is space and far fewer people. The walrus is the draw for adults. For anyone under two it is the aquarium, which is dark and slow and quietly hypnotic.
Free, a jungle under glass inside the Barbican, open on selected days only.
Warm, humid, green and strange, and unlike almost anywhere else on this list it asks nothing of you. Check the opening days before setting off, because they are limited and the walk back out is a long one.
There is a fuller version of this on the site: things to do with kids in London when it rains sorts everywhere by the things that actually decide the day, including step-free access, whether there is a loo, and whether you can be in and out inside two hours.