The little museums in London that are hiding major treasures

London’s big and famous museums — the British Museum, the V&A, always packed with tourists — are world-class, and everyone knows it. But there’s an altogether different world of museums and galleries in the city, one that often goes under the radar.

The little, quirky museums tucked away into houses and attics, or stellar collections that go unnoticed, are run by passionate individuals. These are places where curiosity and historic interest trump acreage and celebrity. Here the real thrill is finding things you never knew you were interested in. Among the treasures here are ancient textiles from Egypt; a museum devoted to the Swedenborgian ideas of thought and vibration, exactly as strange as it sounds; an urn with skeletal human remains. Strange, lovely, or just plain weird, they make for a more idiosyncratic and interesting experience than the well-trodden paths to the big collections.

Osama SM Amin FRCP(Glasg) The Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, above, has one of the largest collections of its kind outside Egypt and Sudan — over 80,000 objects, many of which are on display in two very cramped, but absolutely charming and delightfully old-fashioned rooms. This is a strange mixture of a Victorian museum with wooden cases crammed with pots, toys, jewellery and artefacts from everyday life and a modern institution wrestling with colonialism. One of its rarities is a 5,000-year-old linen shirt, said to be the oldest woven garment known. There is also a sarcophagus and a pottery burial urn from el-Badari dating back to 3000 BC containing the remains of a person in the foetal position in which he was buried. The galleries are quiet, filled with people peering at the objects. The museum holds an almost mystical appeal to young and old alike.

One of the most fascinating thinkers of the 18th century was Emanuel Swedenborg, whose ideas influenced philosophers and artists as various as Kant and William Blake. The Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury offers a curious and subtle introduction to Swedenborg’s world. The theories of Swedenborg are complex — maybe too much to take in all at once — but they command respect. He was a polymath of incredible scope and the rooms here testify to his restless and versatile mind. Its programme ranges from scholarship to the fine arts and the occult — John Deakin has exhibited in the past at the Society, while at the moment Hannah Hughes’s sculptures and collages add to the collection’s interest. Among the strangest items are the incus and malleus, bones found in the human ear, marking a striking transition from telepathy to anatomy. There will be a William Blake exhibition in October.

Hufton+Crow The Hunterian Museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields is the ideal treat for a typically morbid-minded child. There are feet, noses, ears, foetuses and human body parts floating in jars, top right. During my visit, the children seemed to find the entire collection fascinating. I was more hesitant about the gruesome stuff, but gradually the displays began to reveal something beyond their shock value.