Favourite London Places
The Natural History Museum






I still get something of the childhood excitement about entering this great gothic building, purpose built with its creatures crawling up the brickwork and protruding like gargoyles from the guttertops. Going inside through its dark doorway to stand in front of the diplodocus, changed from the 70s when they thought it would hold its head upright and drag its tail on the ground, to an altogether more active seeming skeleton. Love the staircases that lead up and break into two, depositing you on the walkway-balconies, walk along past the skeletal monkeys swinging along the ceiling to a bridged stairway that joins back together to take you up to the slice of Sequioa with dated rings.

Remember school trips (clip boards and questionnaires to fill in) and silently walking through the gem galleries with mum. Visiting the back rooms with EP to take some donated skeletons from the Zoological Museum of the University of Wisconsin. Huge wooden drawers full of specimens. Watching a puppetshow with weird music in the less distant past (lucky enough to be in the museum after hours).