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Charles Darwin (source www.nhm.ac.uk)
Most of London’s major museums are free, including the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Science Museum. But recently the Natural History Museum has been getting a lot of press attention because of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. The Museum is celebrating the anniversary with a special exhibition.
The Darwin exhibition celebrates his ideas and their impact on how we view the world today. It was Darwin’s revolutionary theory that changed our understanding of the world and the exhibition contains rare exhibits and chronicles his life’s work.
And from September 2009 Museum visitors and scientists can share the excitement of exploring, studying and preserving the natural world in the new Darwin Centre. This 8-storey, £78 million landmark building completes the Darwin Centre’s development, which is the most significant expansion at the Museum since it moved to South Kensington in 1881.
Remember, you can discover more London budget tips here.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
Chinese New Year celebrations at Trafalgar Square
The Chinese Year of the Ox will be celebrated with festivities across London. The traditional Chinese Lion dance displays will take place in Trafalgar Square, where a stage will showcase traditional and contemporary Chinese arts. The celebrations will finish with fireworks in Leicester Square.
To coincide with Chinese New Year celebrations, Shanghai in London will be launched. This series of events will showcase Shanghai’s heritage and its preparations for hosting the World Expo 2010 – an exhibition that will straddle the Huanpu River and house pavilions representing over 200 countries and international organisations.
As part of Shanghai in London, visitors to the British Museum can enjoy Treasures from Shanghai, a spectacular display of ancient Chinese bronzes and jades loaned from the Shanghai Museum collection.
The Victoria & Albert Museum hosts Inheritance and Innovation: Wisdom in Urban Development, a seminar exploring how World Expos have changed since London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Finally, City Hall hosts a photography exhibition which charts Shanghai’s rapid development in recent years.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
The British Museum’s new temporary installation, Statuephilia, is a departure from its usual blockbuster exhibitions. The Museum has invited five contemporary artists to display new works amongst its current collection of sculptures that date back to prehistory and antiquity.
Ron Mueck’s Mask II
The Museum’s entrance lobby has been filled with Anthony Gormley’s huge sculpture Case for an Angle I, a winged human figure based on his Angel of the North in northern England. Anthony Gormley, an alumni of Goldsmiths, University of London, said that it was visiting the British Museum in his youth that made him want to become a sculptor.
In The Enlightenment Gallery, another Goldsmiths alumni Damien Hurst, displays a wall of multi-coloured human skulls amongst the antiquarian books but it’s Ron Mueck’s Mask II (pictured) – an oversized human face nestled below a 10th Century Easter Island Statue that was the most arresting. The two figures are separated by ten centuries and 8,500 miles but both are thought-provoking monumental sculptures.
The British Museum contains 2.5 miles of galleries that are being continually added to – so there is always a reason to visit.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
The Old Naval College, Greenwich (Source: Visit London)
The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has been awarded £5 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund in addition to the substantial gift of £20 million from international shipping magnate and philanthropist Sammy Ofer.
The funds will help provide a new, state of the art library and archive facilities complemented by digital resources and a special exhibitions gallery.
The renovated Museum will open in 2012, the year of the Museum’s 75th anniversary and the London Olympics. It will be another welcome attraction in Greenwich – already home to the Royal Observatory, Queen’s House and the Old Navel College, which is home to the University of Greenwich and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.
Greenwich’s maritime links stretch back hundreds of years and it is this connection that made London the largest port of its time, trading throughout the world. The city’s maritime past is still evident with the courses taught within London’s universities.
Students can study at the Centre for Shipping, Trade and Finance at Cass Business School, part of City University London, or enroll on the University of Greenwich’s MBA in Maritime Management. You can search for other maritime courses here.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
Inside the Great Court at the British Museum
To call the British Museum’s temporary exhibitions ‘blockbusters’ may seem unusual but with 850,000 people paying to see its First Emperor exhibition, which also displayed a selection of warriors from the Terracotta Army, the term rings true. It is no surprise that the British Museum should follow this up with an exhibition about another Emperor, that of Hadrian who ruled the Roman Empire for 20 years from 117 AD.
Hadrian ruled one of the greatest empires in history covering the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea as well as modern-day England and Belgium. The exhibition, entitled Hadrian, Empire and Conflict, provides fresh insight into the contradictions of Hadrian’s character and the challenges he faced during his reign while also focusing on his two great passions of architecture and Greek culture.
More than 180 objects from 31 museums around the world are being shown together for the first time with a massive bust of Hadrian, all but perfect save for some damage around the nose unearthed in Turkey in 2007, being a highlight.
The exhibition is being held in the Round Reading Room, often compared to one of Hadrian’s architectural masterpieces the Pantheon in Rome, which sits in the centre of the museum surrounded by the Great Court, enclosed by a fabulous steel and glass latticed roof designed by Norman Foster.
Visiting the museum it is easy to be overwhelmed by the richness of its collection. With seven million objects brought together from all over the world, it is one of the greatest museums on the planet and better still, entrance is free. It would take weeks to explore all the rooms in detail so I recommend focusing on a single room or historical period…and getting there early before the crowds arrive.
Kevin – www.studylondon.ac.uk
Nairtesitnufer's Coffin
I have walked passed the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology every day for five years so today I finally took the opportunity to venture inside and got quite a surprise. Climbing three flights of stairs I entered a museum that looks like it is stuck in a time warp c.1900 and is stuffed to the rafters with artefacts dating back 5,000 years.
The staff were extremely helpful and start you off with a tour of the collection before leaving you alone to browse at your own pleasure. With the aid of a torch, you can see right into the ancient glass fronted wooden cabinets.
The museum was established by Sir William Flinders Petrie in 1892 and houses a collection of 80,000 objects, making it one of the greatest collections of Egyptian archaeology in the world. Only around ten percent of the artefacts are on display owing to space constraints but that didn’t stop the museum from winning the ‘Classic Award’ at the Museum & Heritage Awards for Excellence.
What is on display is still an amazing array of ancient jewellery and pottery as well as one of the oldest garments in the world, the Tarkhan dress, which dates back to 3000 BC. The collection contains detailed stone carvings from the Old Kingdom (c.2500 BC) and ornate Roman portraits from the 2nd century but my favourite was the richly adorned and perfectly preserved wooden coffin case of Nairtesitnufer dating from 750 BC.
The museum, housed within University College London (UCL), is about to be developed and there are plans to create a purpose-built Institute for Cultural Heritage to bring together other priceless artefacts from within UCL’s collections into a new modern purpose-built building.
Before that happens I would recommend you visit the Petrie Museum to get up close and personal to the artefacts and experience how museums used to be.
Kevin
Study London – www.studylondon.ac.uk
Source: Museum of London/Wellcome Images
The Wellcome Trust is one of the world’s largest medical charities but it is also one of the most exciting exhibition spaces in London. Opened in 2007, the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition series has never failed to educate and fascinate in equal measure. Its recent ‘Atoms to Patterns’ exhibition brought together groundbreaking and stylish materials designed by the Festival Pattern Group for the 1951 Festival of Britain alongside the scientific diagrams that inspired them. The exhibition displayed an eclectic array of textiles, wallpapers, fashion, furniture, laminates, carpets and tableware all containing patterns based on X-ray crystallography diagrams. My favourite was the hemoglobin coffee table created by scientist Dr Helen Megaw.
The current exhibition, ‘Skeletons – London’s buried bones’, is in association with the Museum of London. It displays 26 skeletons from the museum’s astonishing collection of 17,000 and for each skeleton the curator has uncovered the ailments and illnesses each person suffered during their lifetime as well as their likely cause of death.
The skeletons were discovered across London, some dating back 16 centuries and were drawn from Roman burial sites of pre-Christian London. Others came from the massive plague pits dug in London from the 14th century to the last great outbreak in 1665.
The lasting imprint that illness and disease has left on the bones is fascinating and really brings history to life. The exhibition is an excellent way of looking at the hardships experienced by ordinary Londoners which contemporary writings rarely cover but it’s not for the faint hearted. The case containing the tiny skeleton of an 11 month old baby is arresting but that’s the beauty of the Wellcome Collection – its exhibitions are challenging and thought provoking and never, never dull.
Kevin
Study London – www.studylondon.ac.uk
“London is a city where different cultures and thoughts meet. Living in this city, I never feel bored.
