And I hit most all of them. Well, the ones I cared about, anyway. I really did save the best 'till last, even revisiting some of the things I'd done early on in the trip when I was still both a) jet-lagged (falling asleep at the National Portrait Gallery, anyone?) and b) so overwhelmed with the amazing stuff I was seeing I was liable to burst into tears upon entering a room (hellooooo British Museum). Saving them all for a big finale meant I was able to really appreciate what I was seeing as individual objects rather than just the initial ZOMGLONDON squeefest I was at the beginning. Not that squeefests are without their own special charms ;-)
Photos, as ever, HERE. In the last week I hit:
- V&A
- British Museum
- National Gallery
- National Portrait Gallery
- Tate Britain
- Savile Row
- Carnaby Street
- Covent Garden
- Tower of London (only the outside and only at night - I went back to get the Crown Jewels guidebook which has the only photo known to man of the awesome coronation stole)
- Cabinet War Rooms & Churchill Museum
- Bank of England
(I'm typing this on the train between London & Lewes, and the trolley service is coming through! I'm almost tempted to ask for pumpkin juice. :-D I've never experienced a trolley service before, not outside of planes, anyway.)
The Cabinet War Rooms were the only other ticketed destination I had any interest in seeing this time around, so I did them first up. Very difficult to take any decent photos, so I mostly left my camera at home. It's interesting to see the conditions under which they were working, and the rooms that have been recreated. The most interesting part to me was the cabinet room itself, the most cramped and confined space you can imagine for the war cabinet & military brass to meet in. You can
almost imagine it working if everyone had everything they needed on a laptop, everyone got on very well, the room was equipped with wifi and no one prattled on. How they did it with with papers (!) I have no idea.
It made me tink of a sermon I heard a while back by a military chaplain, who said it's amazing to see how much extraneous work gets dropped once you go into operational mentality (I think he called it??). You get a sense of how much was done away with during the blitz.
The Churchill Museum had two highlights, one was finding out that he won a Nobel Prize for Literature (I had no idea!) and the other was audio excerpts of his speeches. Once I get home I'd like to read some more of hsi stuff - he certainly did have a way with words.
The Bank of England was just a quick stop off, but I did want to see the place and duck into the museum. It's a very imposing building - the kind of edifice designed to impart confidence that your money is in safe hands. The museum had a display on the history of inflation in Britain. There was a funny "interactive" part for kids, which was a large ball bearing in a tube which you had to keep in the "target zone" of 2% while the spring loaded other end delivering "economic shocks". It was also interesting to see some real life examples of the development of currency - some very early bank notes, among the first to include the phrase "or bearer" - the forebears of our modern notes & coins. (Yeah, I went to London and saw a display on inflation. The geekiness, it knows no bounds. None whatsoever.)
Covent Garden, Savile Row & Carnaby Street were all things I did once I had been kicked out of the various museums.
Savile Row was
le sigh amazing. My tailoring fetish made walking up and down the Row something like what I imagine wandering through the playboy mansion must be life, for those that way inclined. So much talent and craftsmanship concenttrated in such a small space! The most incredible part was peeking into the basement workrooms where you could see some of the cutters and tailors working. (I did wait until after closing to take photos. I'm not *actually* stalking them. At least, not individually.) It was another one of those moments where I encountered names & companies I've known for so long - I've read books, seen docos, admired their work for so long - and then to actually be at the shop front of Huntsman! Dege & Skinner! Henry Poole & Co! Henry Poole & Co Court & Livery Department! And Welsh & Jefferies (by apt to HRH The Prince of Wales) even had a Christmas card from Hand & Lock visible from the window. Just standing there made me happy.
But then there is the utter travesty that is the presence of Abercrombe & Finch at 1 Savile Row. It is an outrage. OUTRAGE, I tell you. Not only is there a shirtless model in the entrance, but it's
ready to wear! Oh, the horror. I weep. I truly weep.
Carnaby Street is right around the corner, so I ducked around just to say I'd been there. Like Savile Row, a street noted for its impact on British style that spread all over the world, but there the comparison ends. The whole area is blocked off as a pedestrian market an had lots of people buzzing around, so it wa a nice place to spend an evening just wandering.
I had planned to spend the time at the big museums in the final week, and they did not disappoint! The V&A is a wonderful place to simply wander. It's a very easy place to get lost in, but if you're not looking for anything in particular getting lost can be delightful. I took a wrong turn straight in from the tube and ended up in the French galleries. I meandered for a bit before coming across two ladies doing conservation work on an old French desk. They had opened it to pull out the interior casing and examine the internal mechanisms. The interior casing was a unit of six drawers and was truly something to behold. Because it's never on display, the paintwork and colour hasn't faded like the exterior. It gave me a real sense of how damaging light and exposure can be.
I went into the exhibition they've got on
The Magnificence of the Tsars which was, yes, magnificent. The embroidery! The cut of the jackets! The braiding! Oh, there was so much to swoon over. It was interesting to see the trends and variations over a number of variations - some had much more western influence and some were very determined to be Russian, and be
seen to be Russian.
The jewellery displays were another stop. I managed to headbut one of the cases while trying to get a closer look at the setting of a diamond ring. OUCH! No permanent harm done to either myself or the case, I'm glad to say. I've always been of the professed opinion that ostentatious displays of wealth in jewellery were
de trop, and that small and simple strands of pearls were more my taste. But...I have to say, spending time in that room with the work of master craftsmen from ages past on display, setting off collections of stones from history and empire...should the occasion demand it, I may deign to grace such settings with my décolletage. Maybe. If pressed.
More time was spent in the fashion displays and textile study rooms. I got kicked out at closing time twice - the guard was very kind and offered to shut up all the other cases first, leaving me a bit of extra time to finish going through the pieces.
The study rooms are
brilliant. The individual pieces/examples are all mounted on vertically mounted glass display slides, arranged in cabinets. You can completely remove each one and prop it up in the study table area to really examine it properly. They're all catalogued thematically so I limited myself to the English & European embroidered textiles. So cool! Such a delicious geek out. I could imagine spending many many happy hours doing nothing but counting stitches, given the chance.
The English galleries were really engaging. They seem to be arranged chronologically rather than thematically, so walking through them is like walking back through history. (And skipping from one floor to the other is like being in the TARDIS.) The
Norfolk House Music Room was a definite highlight. The house was to be demolished, so the walls and ceiling were entirely removed and reconstructed in the museum. It's a tight fit - apparently 10cm of blank space was removed at the top of the walls! It's an extraordinary space, and very few people passed through it (while I was there, at least). I had wild fantasies about bolting the doors and playing something in there, but as before, contented myself with humming. The rest of the gallery spaces had some decent interactive spaces for kids, including one where you could input your own initials and get personalised monograms based on designs in the collection. Then you can email them to yourself! (There was no defined age limit to "kids", it should be noted. And I already decided up at Hardwick Hall that I need a new embroidery pattern for personal branding :-) )
The plaster casts were as impressive and eclectic a collection as I've ever seen. Such a mish-mash of styles and cultures and eras all jammed into two towering spaces, every part of the floor and walls filled with copies or ornate carving from somewhere or other. Trajan's column was split in half on one side. By the time the casting process for that had finished, they must have been real Trajan Pros. (See that? See what my life has come to? I now make tortured puns based on the names of fonts. Why do I do this? Why?!?)
The silver gallery was intimidatingly shiny. As you walk past it you see the glitter coming through the clear cases - very eye catching down the hallway! And on the final day I took another wrong turn and discovered a massive room dedicated to Raphael's cartoons for the tapestries in the Sistine Chapel. As you do.
The British Museum is another one of those places you could easily spend a couple of months just browsing, learning more about absolutely everything as you go. There is just
so much in there! They run various talks and tours during the day on general and particular highlights - I caught ones on Captain James Cook (there is only one artefact from Australia in the entirety of the museum. ONE!), The Parthenon Marbles (awesome), and Roman Emperors (accompanied by a multitude of marble busts). It's all very well done and they seem eager to get people interested and engaged in what could very easily be an overwhelming collection. I'd highly recommend it to anyone. At least check out the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon Marbles. They're something you should see at least once in a lifetime.
And on my final day I did a quick recap of the Tate Britain before heading back to the V&A, and on my way up the Thames to Westminster I discovered the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst outside the houses of Parliament! Delightfully unexpected and entirely appropriate. Votes for Women! (step in time).
Am now down in Lewes with Clara's family for Christmas. They're lovely! And generously hospitable! I know such lovely people. YAY!
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tired
grateful
