Watch fish on a Fijian reef at London's free aquarium

The aquarium in the basement of the Horniman Museum, on Forest Hill, is completely free and offers visitors the chance to immerse themselves in the underwater worlds of tropical Fijian Coral Reefs, British Pond Life, tidal rockpools, a mangrove swamp based on the Caroni swamp in Trinidad, and the South American rainforest area, a recreation of Guyana's Iwokrama rainforest.


The aquarium collection was founded in 1903, and was one of the first public aquariums in Britain. It remained relatively unchanged until 1991, when the modern aquarium first opened, but it wasn't until July 2006 that it emerged in its current form, with a new modernised aquarium opening in the basement of the Museum, developed with the assistance of the Marine Aquarium Council, the Marine Biological Association and the Iwokrama project in Guyana.

Your author passed through the other day and it was very pleasant, despite a few shouting children and the punishing bike ride to the top of Forest Hill. For more on the aquarium, see http://www.horniman.ac.uk/collections/aquarium.php