Category: Visit Review

Due to the avian flu all the walk through areas with birds are closed. The tiger cubs are getting bigger making harder to tell whether they are cubs or adults. The young gorillas were out playing and still look small.

7/10

A lot of people trying to sell you things you don’t really need with the food stall area now renamed to make it sound like it is an extra show. They had different entrances depending on the type of ticket you had and the goodie bag collection point was well hidden and across the show there wasn’t many freebies.

5/10

The London Transport museum exhibits – as the name suggets- London Transport. It has quite a lot of old buses and tube carriages but you can’t go on most of them. It also has a couple of places where you can get an idea of whtanotnis like driving a tube train.

It would be useful if it had more information leaflets about London Transport to encourage more people to use it.

7/10

The Horniman museum is near Forest Hill South East London and has a varied collection of items. It has a permanent gallery of musical instruments and another called the natural history gallery with stuffed taxidermy animals with a random large clock too. There is also a small aquarium which costs extra as do any special exhibitions. There should be some galleries about anthropology but those were closed for referbishment. The museum us in some gardens which have a small collection of animals and views of London including the Shard and St Pauls Cathedral.
7/10

The library ha a number of free exhibitions. The largest has displays Of some of the more famous items it holds. This includes letters to from authors like Jane Austen, it has Nelson’s final letter to Emma Hamilton, and lots of religious items.

It also had a separate display of somr Quentin Blake illustrations and another with examples of advertising for Victorian shows.

8/10

Lots of stalls from around the world but only a couple from the UK.  Quite a lot of free pens, bags and some random stuff like eye masks, stress balls, lip balm and sweets.

7/10

Museum near Kew Bridge about the history of the London water system and about steam machinery.

5/10

Managed to visit all the paid for exhibitions at both galleries in one day by going over the Millennium bridge, getting a bus to Aldwych and then another one to the Tate Britain.

I saw –

The EY Exhibition: Wifredo Lam

The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection

Robert Rauschenberg

Turner Prize 2016

Paul Nash

I also visited the new viewing area in the Tate modern which gives good views over London from their 10th floor of the new wing.

7/10

The London Aquarium is preparing a new area for jellyfish so at the end of the vist there is a lot of building work you need to walk though.  Overall it wasn’t too crowded as it was just after they opened and with Tesco vouchers it was quick to get in.

7/10

On Saturday I visited Bushy House in Teddington. it is part of the National Physical Laboratory and used to be the home of both the mistress and wife of William IV. It has a large garden and offers views of Bushy Park next door.The grounds include a Newton tree which was grown from a cutting from a tree in Issac Newton’s garden where he discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head.

On Sunday I visited Because Marks Synagogue and Gray’s Inn.

The Synagogue had a small queue (much smaller then the queues for the nearby Gerkin and roof garden next door) and had security checking bags at the gate. Inside there was no photography but amanda gave a short talk about the history and background.

Grays Inn was for once not notebook so I could just turn up and look around myself.Thenlibrary, great hall a number of other rooms were open including some balconies.

7/10