The Museum of the Order of St John

Published 21 September 2026 · By the Guide to London editorial team · Editor: Terje Moy

The Museum of the Order of St John is free, open Wednesday to Saturday from 09.30 to 17.00, and takes about 45 minutes. That free part is only the ground floor of a Tudor gatehouse; the Norman crypt, the Priory Church and the panelled rooms upstairs can be seen only on a guided tour, which costs £15 and must be booked in advance.

Knowing that before you set out is most of the battle. Plenty of visitors walk under St John's Gate, look at the galleries, and leave without realising that the oldest and strangest space on the site sits across the square, under a church, behind a door that opens for booked groups only.

Our guide to Clerkenwell sets the gatehouse in its neighbourhood. What follows is the visit at close range: which of the three tours to book, when tickets go on sale, what the £15 buys that the free galleries do not, and the handful of ways to get in for less or for nothing.

What the free half of the museum actually contains

The galleries and shop occupy the ground floor of the gatehouse, and they are free to everyone. They are small. Two rooms and a link gallery, an hour at the outside, and on a weekday morning you may well be the only person in them.

The collection is far better than the square footage suggests. It runs to paintings and illuminated manuscripts, rare armour, ancient coins, silverware, ceramics and textiles, and a bronze cannon given by Henry VIII. The museum has been showing things to visitors here for more than a hundred years, and the displays were rebuilt in a £3.6 million redevelopment that closed the place for fourteen months from September 2009.

Two threads run through it. One is the medieval Order: knights who ran a hospital in Jerusalem, were recognised by the Church in 1113, and moved to Cyprus, then Rhodes, then Malta as the Crusader states collapsed. The other is what the name means to most British people now, which is St John Ambulance, founded out of the Order's Victorian revival after Queen Victoria granted a Royal Charter in 1888.

If a virtual tour is as close as you can get to the upper floors, one runs continuously in the Link Gallery, and the collection is also online.

Three tours, and only one of them sees the lot

This is where people get caught. The museum runs three different tours, all at the same price, and two of them deliberately leave out half the site. Read the description before you click.

For a visitor with one morning in London, Knights, Revellers & Saviours is the one to book. It runs fifteen minutes longer than the others for the same £15, and no other booking puts the Priory Church, the crypt and the historic rooms into a single visit. The other two exist for people coming back, or for groups with a particular interest, and the museum says so openly on each listing.

Booking: the mid-month release, and the cheap routes in

Tours are sold through the museum's Eventbrite page rather than its own website, which is why they can be hard to find. Tickets for each month are released around the middle of the month before: February's dates appear in mid-January, and so on. There is no daily tour; a handful of dates go up each month, and the ones listed when we looked were on weekdays, starting at 11.00 or 14.30.

That release pattern matters if you are planning a trip from abroad. If your dates are more than six weeks out, the tours will simply not be listed yet, and an empty calendar does not mean the tours have stopped. Set a reminder for the middle of the preceding month instead.

Three ways to pay less. A valid Art Pass or Blue Light Card brings the price to £11.25. Islington residents pay £1 on any public tour. St John Ambulance staff and volunteers go free with a promotional code from the museum. For groups of six or more, private tours can be arranged, including outside normal opening hours, with a deposit of £90 against the museum's minimum charge.

The crypt is the reason to pay

The Priory Church stands across St John's Square, about a hundred metres from the gatehouse on the other side of Clerkenwell Road. Beneath it is a twelfth-century crypt, and it is one of the oldest surviving interiors anywhere in London.

The English priory of the Knights Hospitaller was founded here in the 1140s. Henry VIII dissolved it, Mary I restored it briefly with a Royal Charter, and Elizabeth I dissolved it for good. Almost all of it has gone. The crypt did not, and standing in a room that has been continuously roofed since before the Magna Carta is a different order of experience from reading a label about one.

The church itself also holds the Priory Gallery, with an exhibition on life in the medieval priory and on Clerkenwell through the centuries.

There is one hard limit. The church has step-free access, but the crypt is reached only by a flight of steps, and there is no lift. That is worth checking against your own party before you book a tour whose main draw is underground.

The gatehouse has been a coffee house, a magazine office and a pub

What the upstairs rooms preserve is not one period but a pile of them, and the museum's longest tour is built around exactly that.

After the dissolution the buildings were handed around. In the sixteenth century they housed the office of the Master of the Revels, and thirty of Shakespeare's plays were licensed in this building. In the eighteenth century the Gate was a coffee house run by Richard Hogarth, father of the painter, and then the office of The Gentleman's Magazine, where Samuel Johnson was given his first job in London. Later it became a pub, The Old Jerusalem Tavern, where Charles Dickens was among the writers and artists who drank there.

If that last thread appeals, the Dickens house in Doughty Street is fifteen minutes' walk west and works well as a pair with this.

The Cloister Garden closes more often than the hours suggest

Behind the Priory Church there is a free garden, open Monday to Saturday from 09.30 until dusk, planted with herbs of the kind the Knights Hospitaller would have grown for medicine. It is a genuinely quiet place to sit a hundred metres from a main road.

The published hours come with a caveat that is easy to miss. The garden closes for private events and children's activities, and the museum says these usually fall on Wednesdays and some Tuesdays in the school holidays, and on Thursdays and some Wednesdays in term time. Between those two patterns, a midweek visit is the least reliable. If the garden is the point of your trip, the museum will confirm by phone or email whether it will be open.

Free events that are not tours

The museum runs a programme of free drop-in events that most visitors never hear about, and several of them are better value than the tours because they cost nothing.

• Ten-Minute Talk and Tea. A short, relaxed talk on the Order, St John Ambulance or Clerkenwell history, on one Thursday a month, usually the second, from 12.30. Tea and biscuits included. Drop in.
• Under-5s workshops. Free crafting, storytelling, singing and dancing on the second Wednesday of the month in term time.
• Seacole Sessions. Free sensory-friendly workshops in the school holidays for autistic and neurodivergent families, with hands-on making and storytelling. Book a place through the museum's Eventbrite page.
• Audio-described and BSL tours. Run regularly, listed on separate Eventbrite pages.

Evening talks run in partnership with the St John Historical Society, some online and some in the building.

Steps, stools and what wheelchair users can see

The position is honest and worth setting out plainly, because it varies from room to room.

Ear defenders can be borrowed at reception, and the museum publishes visual stories and a sensory map for the galleries and for each tour. The nearest Changing Places toilet is at the Barbican Centre, and our accessible London guide puts the neighbourhood in context.

Roof works from late 2026

In April 2026 the museum announced £413,015 from Arts Council England's Museum Estate and Development Fund, to repair and renew the roofs of St John's Gate, make the building more resilient in extreme weather and add breathable insulation. Work was due to begin later in 2026.

The museum states that it will remain open and accessible throughout. Scaffolding on a Tudor gatehouse is not a reason to cancel a visit, but it is a reason to expect the photograph you had in mind to include poles.

Building a Clerkenwell morning around it

Nothing here takes a whole day, which is the point. Farringdon station puts you five minutes away on the Elizabeth line, Thameslink and three Underground lines; our Elizabeth line guide explains how that fits with the rest of a trip.

Within ten minutes on foot you have the Charterhouse, a Tudor mansion and working almshouse with a free museum, and St Bartholomew the Great, the oldest parish church in the City. The new London Museum opens at West Smithfield on 28 November 2026, a few minutes south. The Postal Museum and Mail Rail is a fifteen-minute walk north-west if you have children with you.

For contrast, this is the opposite of the big free museums. Where the British Museum and the Science Museum ask you to pick a route through several hours of galleries, St John's Gate asks for 45 minutes and gives you a building instead. The same is true of Sir John Soane's Museum and the Hunterian, both free and both a short ride away; our list of London's free museums and our round-up of the city's best small museums put the rest in order. Two others in this vein are worth the journey: the Roman temple under Bloomberg's headquarters and the Fan Museum in Greenwich.

Frequently asked questions

Does the Museum of the Order of St John charge admission?

The galleries and shop on the ground floor of St John's Gate are free to everyone, with donations welcome, and so is the Cloister Garden. The Priory Church, the twelfth-century crypt and the historic rooms upstairs are covered only by a guided tour costing £15 per person.

What days is the Museum of the Order of St John open?

The galleries and shop open Wednesday to Saturday, 09.30 to 17.00. The Cloister Garden opens Monday to Saturday from 09.30 until dusk, but closes for private events and children's activities, which often fall midweek. Guided tours run on selected dates rather than every day.

How do I book a tour of the crypt at St John's Gate?

Tours must be pre-booked through the museum's Eventbrite page, not at the door. Each month's dates go on sale around the middle of the previous month. Book the Knights, Revellers and Saviours tour if you want the crypt, the church and the upstairs rooms on one visit.

How much time does St John's Gate need?

Allow about 45 minutes for the free galleries alone. Adding the 60-minute tour, and the walk across St John's Square to the church, takes the whole visit to roughly two hours. Add the Cloister Garden and a coffee and you have a comfortable half-morning.

Can wheelchair users visit the Museum of the Order of St John?

The galleries are step-free throughout, and so is the Priory Church across the square. The crypt beneath the church and the historic rooms on the upper floors of the Gate are reached by steps only, with no lift. A wheelchair can be borrowed free of charge at the museum.

Sources

• Museum of the Order of St John - Planning your visit (checked September 2026)
• Museum of the Order of St John - Guided tours and prices (checked September 2026)
• Museum of the Order of St John - Access (checked September 2026)
• Museum of the Order of St John - History of the Order (checked September 2026)
• Museum of the Order of St John - Arts Council England investment in St John's Gate, April 2026 (checked September 2026)
• Eventbrite - Museum of the Order of St John guided tour dates (checked September 2026)