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 […]
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
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
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.
Please adjust your watches accordingly.
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
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
[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
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
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
