London
When Eileen and I has visited London in 1998, the “sleeper” hit of our trip was the Design Museum. We had a 1995 tour book that didn’t list it, but the B&B we stayed at had a 1998 edition of the same book and, lo and behold, it listed this (then) new museum. Not knowing what to expect we were blown away by how interesting this museum was.That’s how we felt about the Geffrye Museum. We expected to enjoy it, but it far exceeded our expectations. The concept is simple: what did the typical sitting room look like at different times in English history? From that concept they had reconstructed 11 sitting rooms from different periods ranging from the 1600s to 1990s, with appropriate furnishings and accessories. The exhibit is housed in an old almshouse, so there’s yet another layer of history to explore here.
The Geffrye is the only place we went in London that wasn’t in the central section around Westminster or the Old City. It wasn’t “out there”, being only about 2 miles away from where we’d spent most of our time on prior days, but it felt like we’d gone to another world. It was out in the part of London known as Hoxton, and as such we ended up using not only London Underground but also London Overground to get there.
The almshouse is architecturally a very long building, and the sitting rooms are presented in chronological order as you proceed down a long hallway. We were offered two options for narration: an adult narration and a kid narration. We chose to all use the kid narration so we’d all be hearing the same thing as we moved along. We really enjoyed the narration, which was presented as a series of skits. For example, you’d hear “the mistress of the house” talking about some feature of the room, which might explain why the tea storage chest was such an important item in a given time.
One particularly amusing room was the “1965 living room” which, Eileen commented, looked exactly like her house growing up. In fact, she practically shouted “that was our couch!” as we came into that display. So the authenticity of their recreations seems to be pretty good!
I’m not sure why I didn’t take a single photo at Geffrye. I certainly regret that now. ☹ According to my notes we ate lunch at the museum, although none of us can recall that now. It is possible that we instead returned to the St. Paul’s area in anticipation of our afternoon plans and ate at either EAT or Pret a Manger. Both of these shops are similar, in that they offer a large selection of pre-made packaged sandwiches. They clearly cater to the working crowd. I know that we ate lunches at these places twice while in London, even though I haven’t mentioned in previously (because I can’t recall the specifics and my notes aren’t clear). Despite the wealth of choices the boys were challenged to find something they liked, since the combos were decidedly “English”. Where we’d expect to see lots of ham and roast beef and PB&J in the US, instead there were lots of vegetable and cheese-based sandwiches. The difference in food palettes caused some problems.
I do think this may have been an EAT day, as we had been planning to take a guided walking tour called “London Walk: City of Gallows” later in the afternoon. That was slated to kick off around 2:30P. We had at least two hours to kill, however, so we decided on a whim to walk across the Millennium Bridge and take a look at the Tate Museum first.
Now, we are NOT art museum types. However, I (sometimes) enjoy Modern Art because it is often so inscrutable or, even better, over-the-top silly. So with the hope that we could find something to mock, off we went. Sadly, the art wasn’t of a type that we could make fun of, so we cruised the museum in just under and hour. (Thank you, free admission!) As we made our way back across the bridge towards St. Paul’s – where the walking tour met – we all agreed that we were just too fatigued to do any more walking. We were done with London and just wanted to get back to the hotel and relax.
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| For some reason I only took four photos this entire day, and all were basically this: Tate Britain as seen from the other side of the Millennium Bridge. |
Now, remember way back on our first day when we’d been told that we didn’t need to get Robert (who was, at the time, 13 years old) any kind of transit pass? Throughout our entire trip to this point we’d been using the stroller exits at the Underground stations, where Eileen and I would swipe our cards and one of the boys would go through the gate with each us. This is how the “kids ride free” process works. Well, at the Lancaster Gate station, a gate agent actually stopped us and informed us that this was wrong – Robert needed a ticket! We explained that we’d been told otherwise, but he was insistent that a ticket be procured. The problem was that this station didn’t have any way to purchase a ticket at the exit. The gate agent actually left us standing at the gate (i.e. we hadn’t yet passed through it and were unable to exit the platform) while I was trying to ask him what we were supposed to do. He even walked away at one point before he finally realized that there was really no solution other than to let us pass through. We truthfully told him that we were on our way to pick up a rental car and that this was the last Underground trip we were taking, but I’m not sure he believed us.
With that little hiccup behind us, we walked a few blocks to Alamo and got our car. The car rental pickup process is universal. You wait too long for your turn, it takes too long to initial a ton of forms, and then (finally) your car is delivered. We scored a brand new Mercedes sedan that had less than 50km on the odometer. Sweet! Since street parking is essentially impossible, I had scoped out a car park that was within walking distance of the hotel and we stashed the car there, to be retrieved in the morning.
With the car parked we were finally able to go back to the hotel for a short relaxation before heading for dinner. Where we went is a mystery. If we followed the plan, we ended up at Bizzarro – but I don’t actually recall what happened on this night.
