Plymouth's best museums and galleries

Plymouth is a city that wears its maritime history on its sleeve, and its museums and galleries lean hard into that. If you are looking to fill a rainy afternoon or a cultural weekend, the easiest place to start is The Box, the city's award-winning flagship museum, art gallery and archive over at Tavistock Place. It is free to get in, which makes it an easy default, and it is open from 10:00 to 17:00 Tuesday to Sunday, closed on Mondays and Easter Sunday. The building used to be the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery before it shut in early September 2016 for a major renovation and reopened in 2020 at a cost of 47 million pounds. Since then it has passed the one million visits mark and holds a collection of more than two million items. It took home Art Fund Museum of the Year 2026, and has picked up a Special Commendation in the 2022 European Museum of the Year Awards, Best Arts, Culture and Theatre venue in 2025 and Best Family Attraction in the 2024 Devon Muddy Awards.

What is on at The Box changes fairly quickly, so it is worth checking before you go. Echoes of Us runs until 20 September, Gillian Ayres: A Life in Colour is on from 4 July to 4 October, and The Way We Live opens on 25 September. There is a shop, a restaurant called The Box Kitchen & Bar and research facilities on site, and a National Art Pass gets you 10% off in the café every Sunday. If you want a quieter visit, the quietest times are 10:00 to 11:00 and 15:00 to 17:00 Tuesday to Friday, and 10:00 to 17:00 on Sundays.

Down at Sutton Harbour, near the Barbican and the fish market, sits the National Marine Aquarium, the largest aquarium in the UK. It opened in May 1998 and is run by the Ocean Conservation Trust, with more than 5,000 marine animals of almost 400 different species. It is open every day from 10:00 to 17:00, last entry at 16:00, and closed on 25 and 26 December. Adults are £26, children aged 3 to 15 are £16, concessions for students and over 60s are £23, and under 3s, carers and annual pass holders go free. The aquarium is split into zones: Plymouth Sound, with 17 tanks and about 80 species; Eddystone Reef, with life-size models of whales and dolphins; the Atlantic Ocean, the deepest aquarium habitat in the UK at 2.5 million litres; and Blue Planet, which takes in the Biozone and the Great Barrier Reef exhibits.

For a bit of history, the Mayflower Museum at 3 to 5 The Barbican is dedicated to the Pilgrims and their 1620 voyage, spread across a three-storey building. Smeaton's Tower on Plymouth Hoe is the reconstructed upper section of the third Eddystone Lighthouse, built on the reef in 1759 for 40,000 pounds and moved to the Hoe in the early 1880s, with the site opening to the public on 24 September 1884. It is open daily from 10:00 to 17:00 until 1 November, closed on Easter Sunday, at £8 at the door and £7 online, with The Box members and carers getting in free. The Devonport Naval Heritage Centre at Vivid Approach records the development of the dockyard and Plymouth's role supporting the Royal Navy; it is run entirely by volunteers, admission is free with a donation requested, and a guided tour runs at 11:00 on its opening days. And if you fancy a drink with your history, the Plymouth Gin Distillery on Southside Street is the only place certified to produce the protected style of Plymouth Gin, established in 1793 and the oldest operating distillery in Britain, housed in a building that dates back to the early 1400s.