Category × County
12 Best Museums In Wiltshire
How do you choose between Athelstan Museum and Chippenham Museum and Heritage Centre? On the evidence in front of you, you cannot. Both are the local museum of a Wiltshire market town, both are indoors, both are liked by the people who go. The honest answer is that you do not choose at all: you go to the one in the town you were already going to, and you treat it as the good half-hour in the middle of a morning rather than the reason for the trip. Twelve museums here, and a good few of them work exactly that way.
Top museums in Wiltshire
Showing 1–12 of 12
MuseumsBoscombe Down Aviation Collection
MuseumsREME Museum
MuseumsSTEAM - Museum of the GWR
MuseumsAvebury Stone Circle
MuseumsAtwell Wilson Motor Museum
MuseumsMuseum of Computing
MuseumsChippenham Museum and Heritage Centre
MuseumsAthelstan Museum
MuseumsThe Wardrobe Military Museum
MuseumsTrowbridge Museum
MuseumsVisit Hillbrush
MuseumsAlexander Keiller Museum
The ones worth a journey in their own right are the ones with a subject in the name. STEAM - Museum of the GWR is railways at full size. REME Museum and Boscombe Down Aviation Collection are military engineering. Atwell Wilson Motor Museum is cars and Museum of Computing is machines a good many parents will recognise from their own childhood. Read the names before you read the ratings; on this list the names are more useful.
Museums in Wiltshire: FAQs
Which single one would you travel for with children?
STEAM - Museum of the GWR takes the most obvious route to a child's attention, because locomotives are large and you stand next to them rather than reading about them. REME Museum pulls the same trick with different hardware and tops the twelve on rating. Between the two, ask which your child prefers: things built to move, or things built to survive being shot at. Most have already declared themselves on that.
Does Museum of Computing work for a child, or only for the parent?
Be honest with yourself about who is being taken. Machines from a parent's own childhood carry a charge for the parent that simply is not transmissible, and a child who has never known a world without a screen will not find an old one remarkable. Where it does land is with a child of ten or twelve who has started asking how any of it works, because the older machines are simple enough to explain. Below that age, expect a short visit and enjoy it yourself.
Why is Avebury Stone Circle on a museums list?
Filing, not judgement. Our records place it in this category while marking it outdoor with no indoor space, and that single field tells you what matters: there is no roof and no route through a building. It is open ground you walk across, which suits children far better than most of this list but rules it out entirely as a wet-weather plan. Read it as a good day in its own right that has ended up on the wrong page.
Is it worth doing two of these in one day?
Two town museums, yes, if the towns suit your route, because each is a short visit by design and children finish them faster than adults do. Two of the big subject museums, no. Those absorb whatever time you give them and leave everyone flat for the second one. The pairing that works best in this county is one museum and one stretch of outdoors, since eleven of the twelve are indoors and a day entirely under a roof is a lot to ask of anyone under ten.