This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
The last few hours of daylight of my last day in Rome were upon me. So, sadly, I couldn’t linger in the forum — there was still so much to see!
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
After my first day in Rome, I collapsed onto my bed in my little hotel room, watched Italian TV, and got a good night’s sleep. Which was just as well, as I still had a lot to see on my last day …
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
So. After leaving the Vatican, I headed south.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Rome, beautiful Rome! Is there anything I can say about the Eternal City that hasn’t been said before? No, but I won’t let that stop me trying. It was fantastic both in the sense of great and in the sense of unbelievable — it’s almost hard to believe I really was there. But I have the photos to prove to myself that I didn’t just imagine it all.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
My second (and last) day in Edinburgh was unfortunately pretty much overcast the whole day, so my pictures are a bit dull. But as I spent most of the time indoors, this didn’t matter too much. (Above, Edinburgh Castle from the Princes Street Gardens.)
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
After wandering around Edinburgh Castle, I thought: castles are really cool! I wanted to see more, and since I probably should be a confident user of the British transport system by now, I decided that I’d do a day trip out somewhere to see one. A bit of googling led me to Stirling Castle, a mostly-15th/16th century edifice less than an hour away by train. (I see now that I overlooked Craigmillar Castle, which was closer and looks even more castley. But aside from the castle it seems there wouldn’t have been so much to see there.) So I hopped on a little inter-urban train and headed for Stirling, getting a glimpse along the way of the Forth Bridge and the Falkirk Wheel.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
I’m now covering my last few days in the UK, which I mostly spent in Edinburgh. It’s a lovely city, but I’m sorry to say that I didn’t warm to it as much as I thought I would. That may have had something to do with inflated expectations (everybody I know who’s been there raves about the place), and it may have had something to do with the fact that my summer wardrobe was no longer adequate in this more northerly clime, in early autumn. But I think it was mostly because, having come direct from Hadrian’s Wall, I was now really impatient to get to Rome and see it for myself. Once I managed to put Edinburgh’s position in my itinerary to one side, I did really enjoy it for itself.
Above: the Scottish National War Memorial (see below). Yet again I go for the easy silhouette effect.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Day two on the Roman frontier. This took some careful poring over the tourist bus timetable (route AD122, of course) to try and maximise the number of sites I visited while spending enough time at each one. This turned out to be be a non-trivial problem — the gap between buses varied considerably, and sometimes the buses stopped in Haltwhistle instead of going beyond, so I was having to make calculations like, ‘well, I can go to A in the morning and be there at opening time, but then the bus to B is either 45 minutes later or 3 hours 45 minutes later, which is either too short or possibly too long, but if I want to take in C as well I really need to take the earlier bus because there’s no other way to get there. Or I can go to C first, then come back to B but I’d only have an hour there …’ And so on: it did my head in! It turned out that there was really no sensible way to do more than 2 places, so I crossed the Roman Army Museum off my list and settled on Vindolanda and Housesteads. I didn’t have cause to regret this, as they were both even more absorbing than Chesters had been.
The above photo, incidentally shows Hadrian’s Wall itself, looking back towards Housesteads from the west (it’s past the big clump of trees on top of the cliffs).
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Leaving York, I took the train north to Newcastle, where I took another train heading west to Hexham, a small town in Northumberland. As nice as Hexham was, I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t there during business hours and so didn’t see much of it. Which is a shame, because there’s a fine 12th century abbey and several other medieval buildings there (I did get to see the railway station, of course, apparently one of the oldest in the world). But that was ok, because I was only there to see Hadrian’s Wall, which runs just north of Hexham on its way from coast to coast.
On my first day, I only had time to see one site, so I chose Chesters. Between the 2nd (almost immediately after the Wall was built, in fact) and late 4th centuries it was a Roman cavalry fortress called Cilurnum, sited where the Wall crossed the North Tyne.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
While in York Castle Museum, I was surprised to come across Black-Out, a ’skilful card game — full of interest’. It’s one of the British war games I mentioned in a previous post. At that time I only had a low-res photo from the BBC website to go on, so I was glad of the chance for a closer look.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
My second (and last) day in York. Luckily, since I’d seen the two major attractions (for me) on my first day there, I was free to wander around with only a vague plan in mind. And there was a lot to see. One of the great things about York, I found, was the way in which nearly all periods of history are represented by some substantial survival or site, all within easy walking distance. It’s like a slice through Britain’s/England’s/Northumbria’s etc past. So, to illustrate this, I’ll write this post chronologically by site (rather than chronologically by time of day visted!) With the exception of the above: that’s Clifford’s Tower, which should come in the middle somewhere, but it’s too pretty a picture not to put up front.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Did you know that 87% of the UK’s population, and 99% of its land area, lies outside Greater London? Well you’d barely know it from reading this blog. After finishing my research in that fair city (and after dispensing with the foolish notion of detouring to Cambridge or Aberystwyth to do yet more research), it was time to see a little of the rest of the country, aside from the brief glimpses I’d had already on my trip to Newark and Cranwell. In fact, I was a bit disappointed to discover that I was taking the exact same train line as I had done then, so wasn’t seeing anything new for the first hour plus (though it was nice to see Peterborough Cathedral again, over which PC Kettle saw a phantom airship pass on one fateful night in March 1909 …) After that, it was pretty much power stations all the way to York, my first destination. I arrived mid-morning, found my way to my hotel, dumped my luggage and then set out to explore.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Is it possible to love a city? Surely. Is it premature to declare such a love after only having lived in that city for only two months? I don’t think so: after all, you can fall in love with a person practically on first sight. Love doesn’t depend upon your knowing its object deeply, only upon thinking that you do. I only experienced one season, summer (I’m sure it’s a lot less hospitable now); I never cooked a meal the entire time I was there (no kitchen, or at least none I ever found); I mostly stuck to the inner bits where public transport mostly works. It was really a working holiday, and different to how most Londoners experience their city. If I had to live there properly, and experienced the worst of London as well as its best, I might well feel more ambivalent. But until such disillusionment sets in, I love London!
So, to round off more than two dozen posts I’ve written about my time in London, here’s one more, with some photos that didn’t fit in anywhere else. Above is Eros in Piccadilly Circus.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
I’ve nearly finished with my long series of London posts, but I’ve got a couple more before I recount my travels in the provinces. This one is about Bloomsbury, my home for two months in the (northern) summer of 2007; I really took to it. I’ve written about some of Bloomsbury’s sights before (Charles Fort’s house, Mecklenburgh Square, St Pancras Parish Church, and of course the British Museum). Here are a few more.
Above is Euterpe, the Muse of music. Between 1898 and 1961 she graced the facade of the Apollo Inn on Tottenham Court Road.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Right. My very last day off in London, the first Sunday in September. No longer could I put off the choice between the Tower of London (including Tower Bridge) and Greenwich (the National Maritime Museum, above, and the Royal Greenwich Observatory). As an ex-astrophysics type, I really couldn’t not go and see the observatory at Greenwich. So I decided to do one-and-a-half for the price of one and took a cruise down the Thames, from Westminster to Greenwich. That way I could at least see the Tower and the Bridge as we sailed past …
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
At the end of August, I spent a day and a half at the offices of the Air League, which very graciously had allowed me access to their archives. Their address on Tothill Street is not far from Buckingham Palace, which I hadn’t yet seen. And I hadn’t done Whitehall properly yet. So it was a good opportunity to do the tourist thing, camera in hand.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
After Newark and Cranwell, I returned to London, for the last couple of weeks of my stay there. No longer did the summer stretch out before me. This meant that I had to start making hard choices about how to spend my time, both in terms of my research and my sight-seeing. In my gawking tourist mode, I still had three major sites on my must-see list — Hampton Court Palace, the Tower of London, and Greenwich — but only two sight-seeing days left! The first of these was the summer bank holiday, which turned out to be a nice day, so I chose to head out to Hampton Court Palace, much of which dates to the 15th century. The present building was originally Cardinal Wolsey’s palace; Henry VIII acquired it through not-entirely-honourable circumstances, and it was a popular royal palace up until the Georgian period.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Cranwell is a RAF base in Lincolnshire (not far from Newark or Grantham, or Lincoln for that matter). It was first established as a RNAS training station in 1915, and sortied the odd anti-zepp patrol in the next few years. In the 1930s, Frank Whittle did much of his work on jet engines here; indeed, the first flight of the Gloster E.28/39, on 15 May 1941, was from Cranwell. But it is best known as the home of the RAF’s officer training college, RAF College Cranwell (but usually called Cranwell, just to confuse things). The College was founded in 1919, and the rather splendid College Hall, seen above, opened for business in 1934.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
After six weeks in the UK, I finally got to see somewhere other than London when I attended a conference at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire. To get to Cranwell, I took a GNER train from King’s Cross to Newark in Nottinghamshire, where a RAF courtesy bus took me the rest of the 20km or so to the air force base. Between when the train arrived and when the bus left, I had about 90 minutes to kill, and so I used that time for a quick whirl around the town to see what there was to see. Mainly that was two things: the magnificent ruins of a castle, and quite a large church.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
One week I’m looking out over London’s skyline from the top of St Paul’s, the next I’m exploring underneath its streets, at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms. But this post is only about the latter, as no photography is allowed in the Museum. That’s OK: while the museum was most interesting and very well done (and seemingly a magnet for American tourists), the Cabinet War Rooms — the underground bunker complex from where, in large part, the British war effort was directed during the Second World War — were why I was there. Everything was closed down and mothballed after V-J day, and at least some areas remained as they were during the war, until it was opened up again in the early 1980s; others have been restored more heavily (or turned into cafes!)
Above is the entrance, in King Charles Street, just off Horse Guards Road (and just a block away from Downing Street). It’s next to HM Treasury, though during the war the building seems to have been the Office of Works. On the one hand, the sandbagged entrance with machine gun slit is nicely evocative of a wartime sentry pillbox. On the other, it’s all fake: the real wartime entrance to the bunker was through adjacent government buildings. Plus several of the “sandbags” have been torn by some malcontent and it’s looking a bit tatty!
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
One of the archives I visited during the second half of my time in London was the Archive Collection at the RAF Museum. Sadly the material I turned up, though interesting, was not overall of much relevance for my thesis. So I couldn’t justify spending a second day there. But, on the bright side, the archives closed at 5pm and the museum itself at 6pm — so I was able to able to use that hour to whiz through and have a look at the Fighter Hall, which I’d missed on my first visit.
Above is a Bristol Beaufighter TF.X torpedo bomber (well, the TF stands for torpedo fighter but that’s a bit of an oxymoron, isn’t it). A very versatile and heavily-armed machine, which according to the museum’s sign was called the “whispering death” by the Japanese — but Wikipedia says this is probably a propaganda legend. In front is a cannon (I assume from a Beaufighter), with a few shells in the magazine. Those things are big.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
One week after Westminster Abbey, I visited the other great London church, St Paul’s Cathedral. They are very different in form and function. (They are alike in not allowing photography inside, so again I’ve only got exterior shots. I took some more on an earlier excursion.) Westminster Abbey is medieval and gothic. St Paul’s is Renaissance and baroque, one of Christopher Wren’s great churches, rebuilt after the Great Fire of London.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Probably my favourite place to research in London was the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London, where I spent the better part of two weeks digging through several personal archives. It’s a very pleasant environment to work in, and the staff were very helpful in accommodating this rude colonial’s requests, even at short notice! (Plus they actually sent me the roughly 200 pages of photocopies I ordered; I still haven’t got the batch I ordered from the British Library, and quite possibly won’t now, since it shouldn’t take a month to arrive by airmail …) KCL lies between Strand and the Victoria Embankment, near Waterloo Bridge; I’d usually take the Tube to Embankment and walk up from there, keeping my eye out for anything interesting along the way …
This is the Imperial Camel Corps memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens. I’ve previously written about a relative who was in the ICC and knew there was a memorial to it in London (in itself a bit odd, as most of them were Australians), which I vaguely thought I should seek out while I was there. Turns out I didn’t have to as I stumbled across it completely by chance! It’s quite a striking — though incongruous, amid all the green — statue, though the photo probably exaggerates the size of it.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
One of the benefits of living in London for two months is the way it helped me to understand its geography. So when I read, for example, that 500 men, women and children walked from Greenwich to Trafalgar Square on 22 July 1917 to demand ‘improved air defences for London and the adoption of a systematic offensive air offensive against German towns’,1 I know now that it was actually a fairly long walk (even if they took the omnibus home!) and so shows that their protest march was not a casual affair. And my experience also comes in handy when reading about what was predicted to happen to London when it was bombed, and what actually happened when it was bombed.
In some places, the effects are still easy to see. But sometimes my imagination needed a little help. This is the enclosed garden in the middle of Mecklenburgh Square, where I was staying, in Bloomsbury:
And this is how the poet John Lehmann described Mecklenburgh Square after being blitzed (possibly in September 1940):
Mecklenburgh Square was a pretty sight when I left it. Broken glass everywhere, half the garden scorched with incendiary bombs, and two houses of Byron Court on the east side nothing but a pile of rubble. Clouds of steam were pouring out of one side, firemen still clambering over it and ambulances and blood transfusion units standing by with ARP workers and police. The road was filled with a mass of rubble muddied by the firemen’s hoses, but the light grey powder that had covered the bushes at dawn had been washed off by the drizzle. The time bomb in the Square garden sat in its earth crater coyly waiting. The tabby Persian cat from No. 40 picked her way daintily and dishevelledly among the splinters of glass on her favourite porch.2
The garden where the UXB fell looks so peaceful and quiet today, but once it was right in the front line.
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
OK, it’s time to start catching up on my backlog of travel posts! The day after visiting Westminster Abbey, as it was a nice day I decided I’d go to Hampton Court Palace. Unfortunately it was too nice and I was sweating like a pig while standing in line at the ticket office at Waterloo, so I decided I couldn’t be bothered, went back to Russell Square (after a pointless detour to see how long the queues at the London Eye were) and instead went to the British Museum for a return visit.
Above: detail of a frieze on the Nereid Monument,1 showing two warriors face to face and shield to shield. (Despite thinking this sort of thing was really cool, I couldn’t stand to watch more than 10 minutes of 300 on the plane on the way home.)
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Actually, that should read “ReturnED on a jet plane” as I’m finally back in good old Melbourne-town again, but I find it hard to resist symmetry. (Anyway, I started to write this post at Heathrow waiting for my Qantas flight home, but my laptop crashed twice so I decided that it wasn’t meant to be and just switched it off.) Eventually I’ll be returning to a more normal (life and blogging) schedule, but for now here’s yet another in my series of blurry photos of flying aircraft, which I took from the bank of the Thames, just outside Hampton Court Palace, on the summer bank holiday a few weeks ago. One thing the London sky is not short of is jets!
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
I’m currently at Hexham in Northumberland, where I’ve been busy touring some of the Hadrian’s Wall sites: Chesters (yesterday), Vindolanda and Housesteads (today). All of which were utterly memorable, and a write-up will eventually be forthcoming; but it was only at Vindolanda that I was buzzed by a very low- and very fast-flying Tornado! It turns out that Vindolanda is within the RAF’s Low Flying Area 13, so it’s probably a common enough event around here; but it’s not very common to me. Although I fumbled with the camera, I did manage to take one picture of it, before it screamed over the horizon:
Here’s a close-up:
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
So, after just under two months in London, it’s time to leave. Tomorrow morning I’m on the train1 to York, then after that, Hexham (near Hadrian’s Wall), Edinburgh, Rome2 before finally getting back to good old Melbourne-town on 18 September. It should be a great way to cap off what has already been a fantastic trip, and will also give me a chance to unwind a bit before I plunge into the task of assessing the material I’ve gathered here in London.
So what have I been up to? From my posts it probably seems as if I’ve spent all my time sightseeing, but (in case my supervisor is reading this!) actually that was only one or two days a week. Apart from attending two conferences, giving one presentation, and meeting with a number of aviation historians, the rest of the week was usually spent in some archive or library, including:
- British Library (newspapers, books and manuscripts)
- Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London
- Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum
- Royal Aeronautical Society Library
- Air League
- Archive Collection, RAF Museum London
- Science Museum Library
I got to see most of what I wanted; though an extra day at RAeS and the RAF Museum would have been most useful, and I never made it to places like the Marx Memorial Library or the British Film Institute. And I may even spend half a day at the National Library of Scotland while in Edinburgh, though that’s looking doubtful now. I printed or photocopied over 3000 pages, mostly from microfilmed newspapers, and took nearly 1600 photos of documents. And that’s excluding the transcriptions I made of other documents which didn’t seem worth filling out a form to get photocopied. I have no idea if this is a lot in relative terms, but in absolute terms the idea of going through all that is making me feel faint!
There have been a few surprises along the way. The most surprising thing, and a pleasant surprise at that, was bumping into Alex Dickson at the RAF Museum, who is doing his PhD on the origins of the RAF Volunteer Reserve; we eventually realised that we’d corresponded some time back, but completely by chance he had come down from Scotland to visit the RAF Museum on the one day that I was there, and to look at the same papers too! Sometimes it’s a very very small world indeed.
Another surprise was that in this day and age (viz, the Internet Age) I should have to print out 3000 pieces of paper (the university library at home allows you to save to a USB stick, though the process is slightly cumbersome). And because I can’t carry 3000 pieces of paper with me, I had to send them home in a big box, along with some books, totalling 25kg: I don’t even want to say how much that cost! And because I was paranoid about the big box going missing on the way to Australia (and therefore wasting most of my trip here), I took the precaution of taking photos of each and every page beforehand. Some of them may be a bit blurry, but it will be far better than nothing if disaster strikes. Digital technology to the rescue, that’s great and all; but it seems like there are one or two intermediate steps which could be eliminated here!
But the most surprising thing I learned here was how to put on a tie — surprised that I had to do it at all! I’ve never needed to wear one before and would have quite happily gone to my grave never having learned how to tie one. But one of the conferences I went to was at RAF Cranwell; and even civilians needed to adhere to a minimum standard of dress (”Planters”) while in the main building. Including, for men, the wearing of a tie. So first I had to buy a tie, which vaguely went with the shirts I brought with me, then learn how to put it on (the night before the conference). Of course that wasn’t hard at all, but it wasn’t anything I had expected to be doing here in London either.
Thanks to everyone who has shown me great hospitality while I’ve been here; you’ve helped make this trip memorable and not just productive! I look forward to catching up with you all some time in the future, here most likely, or in Melbourne if you ever happen to visit. I should have some form of net access while traveling, so I don’t expect a real blog hiatus, though how much I’ll be able to post is another question. Probably more travel blogging, I’m sorry to say: I promise there will be plenty more of the traditional Airminded fare when I get back to Australia! Er, and more travel blogging too, I suppose.
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Of course.
I cancel a planned1 trip to Hamburg for a conference in order to extend my stay in London by 4 days, so I can hit a few more archives and libraries that I really wanted to look at. And what happens? A 3-day tube strike, which started this afternoon and finishes the evening before I leave. To make matters worse, the places I want to go have been closed for the last week or more, and so I haven’t been able to confirm any appointments. So I don’t where I’m going or how I’ll get there. I’m so glad I decided to stay the extra days.
Actually, it’s not as bad as all that: one of the places I can walk to, another is on the Piccadilly line, which is my local line and is one of the few still running. But it will probably be packed solid. Again, getting to Peckham will in theory be ok, since the Northern line is also still running and so I can get to London Bridge and thence to Peckham Rye by National Rail. But of course, like every other poor sod using public transport I’ll have to factor in long delays and leave much earlier than I otherwise would. Just what I didn’t need to be doing when I’ve already got too much to do before I leave!
If only there was another way to travel …
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
In some ways it seems as if I’ve only just arrived in London; in others, it’s like I’ve been here forever. But I now have just under a week left here, so I’m racking up a lot of “last times”.1 Today was the last time I visited British Library Newspapers at Colindale, which is where I’ve spent most of my time, actually — nearly every day there for the first month, the odd day or two since then.
So, to mark this occasion, here’s a picture of a TARDIS:
- Though also still a number of firsts: yesterday was the first time I wandered past Buckingham Palace. For those non-Australians who might not know, Buckingham Palace is where the Queen of Australia lives when she is not back home. It’s a nice enough little holiday house; though I did wonder why the Union Jack was flying and not the Australian flag — seems rather un-Australian, if you ask me.
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
The Saturday after the IWM, I visited Westminster Abbey, where the kings and queens of England have come for the best part of a thousand years to be crowned, married and buried. (I’m way behind on these travel posts, I’ll still be writing them up a month after I get back.) No photography is allowed inside the Abbey, and as I obeyed this rule — unlike some people! — all of the photos will be of the exterior, which unfortunately is less than half the fun.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Sunday no. 4 was the occasion (after the spooky Big Ben) for my visit to the Imperial War Museum London, which of course was always going to be a highlight of my sightseeing here.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Please adjust your watches accordingly.
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Yesterday I had occasion to pass Cleopatra’s Needle on the Victoria Embankment. It’s not really Cleopatra’s at all but Thutmose III’s, as it was he who caused it to be erected at Heliopolis, in around 1450 BC. It was eventually transported from Egypt to London and re-erected there in 1878, after trials and tribulations in the Bay of Biscay.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
My third Sunday here: I still hadn’t seen the Thames yet and so decided today was the day. I began with a visit to the Tate Modern, which was tres cool (especially the Dalí exhibition, for all your clock-melting and eyeball-slicing needs) but they don’t allow cameras. So you’ll have to be satisfied with this photo of the gallery itself, or at least its smokestack (it used to be a power station). The pretty little pub on the left is called the White Hart — sadly, not Arthur C. Clarke’s non-existent pub of the same name.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]
One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which represent war in some way. War games, but not yet wargames. So for example, one exhibit in the Science Museum’s aviation gallery was a First World War-era board game called Aviation: The Aerial Tactics Game of Attack and Defence. The board represents the sky, and the pieces are aircraft and squadrons. Here’s the box:
According to the caption, it was published around 1920, and the cover shows ’stylised First World War tanks and Handley Page H.P. 0/400 [sic] bombers’. It doesn’t look particularly like an O/400 to me; the corresponding game-piece is just called a Battle Plane (and the “tanks” are actually anti-aircraft guns on tank chassis, very advanced!)
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
You want planes? We got planes.
After the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, though really it should be called the Technology Museum as there’s not a lot of what I would call basic science on show (perhaps due to the afore-mentioned Natural History Museum being right next door). Still, that’s just nit-picking, as this is yet another truly excellent museum.
I headed straight for the space section …
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
A rather Vorlonish-looking whale skeleton.
On my second Sunday here (so the day after the RAF Museum, I’m way behind here), I travelled out to South Kensington to visit the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, which are right next to each other (and the Victoria and Albert is conveniently located just across the road, but will have to wait for another day). The NHM (opened 1881) is one of the great natural history museums of the world, and its creation (for a long time, as a semi-independent arm of the British Museum) on such a grand scale is a testament to the importance of the life and earth sciences in Victorian Britain. The architecture alone is powerful:
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
On my way back from the RAF Museum, I paused to take some pictures of the beautiful neoclassical St Pancras Parish Church, completed in 1822. They don’t really do it justice, but I do like this one, of one of the caryatids guarding the entrance to the crypt. The caryatids were modelled on those on the Erechtheion, and the crypt was used as an air-raid shelter in both world wars. You’re never very far away from history in this town.