Week 5: Museum Frenzy

By the fifth week in London, it was finally hitting me that I only had a little over a week left in this incredible country. With that said, Megan and I were scrambling to go see all of the things that we hadn't had a chance to earlier. We focused mostly on museums. London is overflowing with history, and one of the best things about the city is the multitude of museums, on an astounding range of subjects. We went to the Charles Dickens' Museum, the British Museum, the Museum of London, the British Library, the Wellcome Trust, the Museum of Natural History, and the Science Museum, just to name a few. The best thing about most of these museums was that they were absolutely free.

Awesome Dickens' Museum merchandise.

The British Library had a Propaganda Exhibition when we went, so they had the Orwell merchandise front and center! I absolutely adored the censored 1984 book cover in the bottom right.

The British Library had a six foot story bookcase. Nowhere else in London is this beautiful.

The cafe tables were right beside the bookcase. Perfect placement!

The Museum of Natural History featured an elevator literally through the earth to reach the rest of the museum. Ingenious. 

Even Twinings had their own museum in the back of the shop! They're really proud of their history in London, and understandably so.

The Victoria and Albert Museum was an incredible building, in addition to having a diverse and astounding collection.

Oh you know, just the ceiling for a museum. The usual.

There was a more "modern" section of the Victoria and Albert museum, and this was on display there.

Same as above; they also had clunky electronics from the eighties and nineties as part of this exhibit.

It's baffling to me how much stuff there was to do in London. Like Dr. Johnson said, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." We spent a fair amount of time at each of these locations, yet we barely even scratched the surface of some of them. 

My favorite place turned out to be the British Library, even though it doesn't seem like it would fit in this category. It was radically different than my conception of a library in the United States. Sure, there were books in it, but they also had a bookshop, a gift shop, and regularly hosted events. They had a Propaganda Exhibition when we went, and for five pounds, it was definitely worth it to gain admission. They had an enormous room devoted to the history of propaganda, and the role that it's played over the years. It was so neat to see actual pamphlets from the WWII era. Also, they had a plane hanging from the ceiling, with an intricate assortment of papers fluttering underneath it because apparently planes actually used to drop propaganda to people below. That is one of the weirdest things that I had ever heard. Even more interesting was the fact that so many of the museums were remarkably kept up. Both in this propaganda exhibition as well as the Museum of London, they had information from 2012 in it! I must just not be that familiar with museums, but this was particularly striking to me. In the propaganda exhibition, they had a section on how propaganda is distributed online, and had multiple computers set up so that you could scroll through several twitter feeds, looking at particular preset topics: they had one for Obama's reelection, as well as the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. It was astonishing to see history juxtaposed with the advanced technology of today.