Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - third trip to london-looking for off the beaten path

Here's a list of "off the beaten track" London attractions that was covered recently in a travel slot on an Irish radio programme (The Right Hook, on Newstalk Radio):

Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising (MOBPA).

Once you get over the long winded name, you will find a history of consumer culture spanning the last 120 years. In 1963, sixteen year old Robert Opie decided to hold on to the wrapping from a packet of Munchies and over the next forty years he collected toys, household brands, magazines and royal souvenirs. MOPBA features over 12,000 items including space hoppers from the seventies, cornflake boxes from the fifties and even dolls from ancient Egypt.

•2 Colville Mews, Notting Hill
Estorick Collection

The stylish Estorick Collection is housed in a Grade II-listed Georgian building in Islington and filled with Italian art dating from 1890 to the 1950s. Its permanent exhibition has a focus on futurism, an Italian movement based on an admiration for modernity, speed and technology. Other highlights include a series of drawings by Modigliani and a handsome collection of sculptures. After a good poke round the gallery, its worth stopping for a coffee in the secluded courtyard café round the back.

• 39a Canonbury Square, London N1, estorickcollection.com

Secret Garden
This small green haven lies in an unlikely Hackney location, featuring natural woodland, a sensory herb garden and vegetable beds currently sprouting kale, winter lettuces and brussel sprouts. Local residents are all given a key to the garden, but the rest of us can visit for free between 9am and 5pm on Mondays to Fridays. Visit the website for more information.

• 50 Pearson Street, London E2, stmaryssecretgarden.org.uk

Secret Cinema

If cinema trips have lost their edge and you're fed up of paying ungodly sums of money at your local multiplex, then sign up for the phenomenon that is Secret Cinema. Each month you rock up at an unusual destination to watch a film, often with special guests and intriguing live installations. Recent nights have included a screening of Lindsay Anderson's classic 60s film If … at Dulwich College, and Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park in a disused railway tunnel. Last month's offering was the Marx brothers' A Night at the Opera, shown at the Hackney Empire and complete with musical accompaniment, boiled sweets and an operatic rendition from Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci. The catch: you don't know what the film will be until you arrive - but then that's half the fun.

• secretcinema.org

Spa London

London's first public-sector day spa in the York Hall leisure centre in Bethnal Green is surprisingly luxurious and certainly worth a visit. The Turkish baths that originally stood on the site have been restored and renovated, and you can now enjoy a thoroughly relaxing three-hour thermal spa experience for only £20.

• York Hall leisure centre, Old Ford Road, Bethnal Green, London E2, spa-london.org

18 Folgate Street

This appears to be a typical Georgian terraced house in Spitalfields, until you step behind the front door and are swiftly transported back to the 18th century. Severs, originally from California, moved into the house in 1979 and took it upon himself to recreate the home of a fictitious family of Huguenot silk-weavers. As you enter each candlelit room there is a sense that the occupants have just slipped out - a half-eaten meal sits on the table, beds are left unmade and peculiar smells waft around. The attention to detail is impressive, verging on obsessive, with what Severs called his "still-life drama" blurring the line between history and fantasy, truth and imagination.

• 18 Folgate Street, Tower Hamlets, London E1, dennissevershouse.co.uk

Hunterian Museum
A free collection located inside the Royal College of Surgeons of England, consisting of thousands of medical instruments and specimens that range from the curious to the gruesome. Following a recent £3m renovation, you can see everything from Churchill's dentures to anatomical tables from the 17th century and more pickled internal organs than you probably ever wanted to see.

• The Royal College of Surgeons of England, 35-43 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2, rcseng.ac.uk/museums

Wilton’s Music Hall

A crumbling treasure, Wilton's is the world's oldest and last surviving grand music hall, and now runs an eclectic range of events including opera, theatre and concerts, as well as guided tours for a fiver. The venue has an incredible history – it was a shelter in the blitz, a rag warehouse in the 50s, and saved from demolition by Sir John Betjeman in the 60s. It's currently falling apart, so rush and visit before it's lost forever.

• Graces Alley, off Ensign Street, London E1,
www.wiltons.org.uk

Fitzroy House

If the fact that George Bernard Shaw once lived in this original late 18th-century house in the heart of Fitzrovia wasn't enough, wait, there's more. For this is the former home of L Ron Hubbard - not only the founder of Scientology, but as the Fitzroy House website explains, "a professional in over two dozen fields including photography, horticulture, sea captaining, music making and exploration", as well as the holder of the Guinness Book of World Records' title for most published author (1,084 publications to be precise). To attend a free tour, call up in advance, but be prepared for a rather strange experience as you learn a myriad of peculiar facts about Hubbard, and are shown many a photo of a plump man in a cravat.

• Fitzroy House, 35-37 Fitzroy Street, Camden, London W1T,
fitzroyhouse.org

Free Stuff

A great tip for the huge variety of free stuff in London is to look through www.londonforfree.net