Freud Museum London

The Freud Museum stands in a quiet Hampstead house where Sigmund Freud spent his final year. The red-brick building in Maresfield Gardens was finished in 1920 and still shows the Queen Anne Revival style. Freud arrived in 1938 after fleeing Vienna, bringing his consulting couch, books and antiquities with him. His daughter Anna lived on until 1982, preserving rooms exactly as they were. The museum opened to the public in 1986 after her wishes were carried out. Freud completed his last book, Moses and Monotheism, in this house. He also continued to see patients for psychoanalysis in the same consulting room. The centrepiece is the couch from Berggasse 19 in Vienna, where patients practised free association. The museum owns Freud’s Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities plus his personal library of 18th- and 19th-century books. A portrait by Salvador Dalí hangs among family photographs and favourite authors’ works. On the ground floor visitors find Freud’s study, library, dining room and the original hall. The first floor holds Anna Freud’s room and a temporary exhibition space for contemporary art. A modern sun room added by Ernst Freud in 1920 opens onto a garden kept much as Freud knew it. Offices occupy parts of the house, but the public areas remain intact. The museum also runs research programmes and educational visits for those interested in Freud’s legacy.