Apr 14 - London

 Apr 14 - London

There was a potential to have museum overload today as we were off to South Kensington to visit 3 of the most well known museums in London.


First cab off the rank was the Victoria & Albert, commonly known as the V&A.  However, as we’d arrived far too early, they open at 10:00, we went to look for the Science Museum ‘Covid’ centre.  The reason for this is that we needed to get our Australian vax certificates converted into something the EU recognises if we want to do any travelling in Europe i.e. a British NHS Covid Pass.  This agreement with the EU is something else our illustrious federal government has failed to do during Covid (yet the Kiwis have had an agreement for ages!).  Anyway, all sorted now, and we were off to the V&A.


The V&A is the world’s largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts, and design, and according to the official blurb houses a permanent collection of over 2 million objects, it’s brilliant (and enormous!).  To do the place justice you’d need to spend at least a full day there (probably more) so we really only touched the surface. What we did see however was great, a real mixture of objects including porcelain, ceramics, glassware, tapestry, and sculpture, and there’s also a gallery of copies of other artwork from around the world.  It was magnificent (a word I feel I might be overusing! 😊)

Next on our list was a visit to the Natural History Museum (NHM), and OMG what a building, it’s spectacular!  Apparently the style is “combined Gothic Revival and 12th Century Romanesque architecture with lavish decoration inspired by the natural world”, whatever, I just love it! 😍

The NHM, home to seemingly anything related to life and earth sciences, is a great place to visit, and they have some superb interactive exhibitions, but, a ‘word to the wise’, don’t go during school holidays!  There were ‘millions’ of kids there during our visit and it just wasn’t possible to get near half the exhibits and, although we did spend a couple of hours there, we’ll just have to go back another time. 


Last port of call today was the Science Museum.  Not so impressive building-wise, but we had a great time in there. Exhibitions cover anything from Medical to Aeronautics to Telecommunications and anything in-between. Lots of great interactive displays and also loads of stuff that went over my head! (Science being another subject I don’t know much about!) but an enjoyable time was had by all. 

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