London continued: 90 minutes at the Natural History Museum

Last time we were in London, we thought we'd visit the Victoria and Albert one morning followed by the Natural History Museum in the afternoon. Didn't work out: we couldn't pull ourselves away from the V&A. This time, having heard from a respected source that the Natural History Museum rocks, we decided to start the day there; we'd already seen the V&A after all, so we could just go there in the afternoon, take a little stroll through, look at the Mediaeval exhibits that were closed when we were last there, and we'd be good.

We figured out pretty darned quick that we would not last long at the Natural History Museum; for some reason it was crawling with small, noisy children! Once we realized that our time was limited, we consulted the map and decided what we needed to see before our sanity ran out. We saw a bunch of fossils (including Mary Anning's*), a bunch of stuffed birds, and the famous Diplodocus, Dippy...


...but mostly we were interested in the architecture. We don't know much about architecture, if anything, but we were quite taken with this building, full of detailed references to natural history.


Look at that beautiful stonework behind Darwin. (Sara had to wait what seemed like eons to get a clear shot of him; people kept posing with him.)

The ceiling of the main hall:


There were animals everywhere:




I really liked these little monkeys climbing up the arches - look closer and you see that the arches are vertebrae.

Monkeys again:

And the outside was equally impressive...

Gargoyles, natural history style...







Next installment: the V&A revisited.

*There are three recent books on Mary Anning and her fossils: The Fossil Hunter by Shelley Emling (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier (Dutton, 2010), and Curiosity: A Love Story by Joan Thomas (McClelland & Stewart, 2010).

**If you're into dark, wild urban fantasy, try Kraken by China Mieville (Del Rey/Ballantine, 2010), about the impossible theft of the Natural History Museum's giant squid, Archie.