It’s a public holiday today in London and sadly for the end of the holiday long weekend it is pouring with rain. Although that doesn’t stop people from going out!! Given our limited time in London, we do the same. We decide to head to Hampstead, a village about 30 minutes north by the underground.
As we arrive the rain is coming down in buckets, we find a little café for some breakfast and sit in the warm dry air for a while, hoping the rain eases. Breakfast, at Olive and Sage, is nice, nothing spectacular. Mardi has eggs benedict, and I have Turkish eggs, supposedly spicy, but not so much. Something we have noticed since arriving is the food is very bland. Not a lot of spice, or salt.
After breakfast we walk down Flask Lane into Flask Walk, so named after the pub that has been here for three hundred years, The Flask. After only ten minutes, we give it away. The rain is just too much, and we are getting soaked, despite our rain jackets. We hope back on the train and head for a museum instead.
We go to Knightsbridge, the Victoria and Albert is here as well as the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. We wait in line at the Natural History Museum: it seems everyone else has the same idea, the line to get in stretches for hundreds of metres. Mardi checks out the head of the queue to see what our wait might be like
“Hours” she comes back with. We decide to not wait and instead cross the road to the V and A.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, commonly known as the V&A, is located in South Kensington, London, near Knightsbridge. Established in 1852, it is the world’s largest museum of applied and decorative arts and design, housing a collection of over 2.3 million objects. The museum’s extensive collections span 5,000 years of art, from ancient times to the present, and include ceramics, fashion, furniture, textiles, photography, sculpture, and more. Notable for its stunning architecture, the V&A also features a rich program of temporary exhibitions, educational activities, and events, making it a vibrant cultural hub.
We wander the various halls looking at antiquities from by-gone eras, architectural exhibits and a furniture exhibition. It’s an amazing space, large and confusing at times and after a couple of hours we call it a day.
On our way home, we stop at a Marks and Spencer convenience store at Bond Street Station and grab some snacks and a sandwich for dinner. It is still very wet, so we spend the afternoon and evening in-doors catching up on reading. I also prepare for some meetings for work that I have, as well as my visit to the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB).
