herb garret

Quietly lingering in the shadows of Europe’s tallest building, the Herb Garret in the attic of St Thomas’s Church near London Bridge stored the dried flowers and plants used for medicine before the days of packages of paracetamol. The Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret has to be one of London’s most London-y places: Blink and you’ll miss it. Look the other way as you walk past, and you might …

Skeletal hands down, the Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret is my new favourite small museum in London. To enter, pull yourself along the worn rope that snakes up the steep, creaking spiral staircase to find a church attic where Victorian medical students learned how to perform amputations, a hidden space rediscovered only 58 years ago. Despite all of medical technology’s advancements, assurances of only a few seconds of pain and the promise of unicorn …