Week 17 - Visit a museum

Spending a week or so in London gave me the perfect opportunity to tick off another card on my list of 52 for the year. Seeing as I haven't been doing all that well recently with the cards I said I'd go for broke with this one and not limit it to one museum. (I know, I'm crazy!!)

On Wednesday last I headed to the South Kensington to get me some culture. This area of London is home to a number of world class museums within a stone's throw of one another. The Victoria & Albert Museum is, in its own words, the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design. It's a spectacular building which houses a collection of some 4.5 million objects including incredible works of art, textiles, photography, sculpture, furniture and ceramics that span over 5,000 years of human history. I didn't have time unfortunately to see all of the exhibits that cover its 12 acre footprint but I'll definitely be back to explore it in more depth. Decided to bring Pac-Man for a bit of a stroll too!

 

 The next stop on my afternoon at the museums was The National History Museum, an equally impressive building. Like the big child that I am, I headed straight for the dinosaur exhibition which was extraordinary. I don't care what anyone says, you're never too old to think dinosaurs are cool! The exhibition went right through the various ages and varieties of dinosaur but as you'd expect the animatronic t-rex was the star of the show. After skipping quickly through a couple of million years of history, I made a beeline for the big cats but disappointingly they were just another display in a big corridor of far less impressive beasts. Somehow I managed to stumble across the biggest hall in the entire place, home to a full scale blue whale and a number of its brethren with a supporting cast of giraffes, elephants and dolphins but most impressively of all, a collection of wooly mammoth type giants.

 

 

Having raced my way through mosaics, mammoths, terracottas and a t-rex, I just about had enough time to take in some of the Science Museum and especially an exhibition about Winston Churchill and technology the Allies employed during World War One which I'd seen posters for dotted all around London. Churchill was fascinated by science and technology and put together what was effectively a brains trust of brilliant scientist and engineers who worked on areas like developing a reliable form of radar, the production of penicillin and antibiotics and Britain’s top secret research behind the first atomic bomb. Fascinating stuff for a complete nerd like myself!

So that concludes my mini museum marathon! Decided to add a fourth and go to the Tate Modern too but that may have been a museum too far. Incredibly cool building, even if it has some REALLY strange stuff in it that somehow counts as art! Who am I to criticise I guess... I'm a professional crayon engineer after all! :-)