London

Posted by Anura Samara, 5 December 2014

London was the next stop on our week-long holiday with Catherine. She loves history and planned to see the The Tower of London with a friend but London is great, there’s just so much to see and do even if the days are shorter and the weather is cold and wet.

There’s so much to see, and we’ve seen a lot on previous visits. But as always when visiting other cities for us a lot of the pleasure comes from just walking the streets and feeling the city living around us.

Westminster abbey

We took Catherine to Westminster Abbey. We’ve been several times before, but it’s still always impressive. It’s a complete change from European cathedrals which tend to be sparse – Westminster is packed with memorials on the walls, on the floors and even stacked on top of each other in corners. Too many to read and take in – we probably overlooked someone really important.

Catherine’s not one for stopping and reading every sign, so our visit was over relatively quickly – relative to how long we normally take to visit a place.

Duckett’s Passage

While we were in London, I just had to take the girls to see Duckett’s Passage. If you’ve never seen Goodnight Sweetheart, then you’ll have no idea how important this place is but it’s pivotal to the whole TV show and appears in every episode.

So it’s bizarre to walk down in, to feel it’s familiarity but then notice the differences as well. If we’d had more time, I would have liked to ducked into the Royal Oak for a pint but we were pressed for time as we still needed to find the Dr Who Shop before closing time.

West End Shows

We had booked tickets to see Mamma Mia, but we enjoyed it so much that we bought tickets to see The Lion King on the next night.

Museums

On our last day, instead of just threatening rain like the earlier days it decided to rain all day. So we thought we would stay indoors and visit a couple of museums.

Victoria and Albert Museum

In the morning, we went to see the Victoria and Albert Museum. I have a vague recollection that I may have been there as a child, but I really had no idea what to expect. It promotes itself as the “world’s greatest museum of art and design” covering centuries of European, Middle Eastern and Asian art. With limited time, we went decided to focus on Mediaeval and European collections, and also looking at some of the more modern stuff too.

Probably the best item on display is one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. It’s in a small case, so you can look at it from just a few centimetres away – it’s amazing to see the drawings and handwriting in his original hand, literally right in front of your nose.

Science Museum

After meeting Catherine for lunch, we set off for the British Science Museum. I’d heard about the new gallery on the Information Age on one oy my podcasts, and I was really keen to see it. So while Juliane explored the other floors, I headed straight for the gallery.

The gallery judges that the start of the information to be when messages were first transmitted over wire. From here, we see the first transatlantic messages being sent, then through wireless, telephones, video and TV and satellites, all culminating in modern communications through mobile phones and the internet.

It’s a great gallery, with lots of displays of real items and clear information on how each new development worked to improve the flow of information. For me, the best display was the actual NEXt computer that Sir Tim Berners-Lee used to develop the World Wide Web. And there’s a video presentation from him on how routers and packet-switching works.

I was conscious of the time, so didn’t linger over every display as much as I would have liked. But even then, I met up with Juliane and left just on closing time.

Categories: UK

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