Natural History Museum, V&A, Science Museum in One Postcodeish Zone: Fiona’s Strategic Guide
By Fiona MacLeod | UK London Info
South Kensington contains, within approximately fifteen minutes’ walking distance of the tube station, three of the world’s great museums: the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Science Museum. All three are free for the permanent collections. All three are extraordinary. The challenge is not deciding whether to go but deciding how to go without trying to do all three in one day, which is the museum scheduling error that produces the kind of cultural overload where you stop seeing what you are looking at.
The Natural History Museum: Morning
Go to the Natural History Museum first, in the morning, and see the dinosaurs. This sounds like advice for children and is actually advice for adults, because the Natural History Museum’s dinosaur gallery is the best argument for the existence of natural history museums that exists, and the blue whale skeleton that now hangs in the central hall where Dippy the Diplodocus used to stand is one of the genuinely impressive objects in any London collection. The building itself, designed by Alfred Waterhouse and completed in 1881, is cathedral-like in its scale and Gothic in its decoration, with terracotta tiles depicting living and extinct animals on its facade that you will not notice until someone points them out and then will not be able to stop seeing.
The current special exhibition, which runs through September, is on the deep ocean and covers the science and ecology of the parts of the sea that most life never reaches and most people never see. It is the kind of exhibition that the NHM does better than almost any institution in the world: the combination of scientific rigour, beautiful specimens, and design that makes complex information comprehensible to a visitor who arrived knowing nothing about the subject and leaves knowing something they will tell other people.
The V&A: Afternoon
Cross Exhibition Road in the afternoon and spend two hours in the V&A, which is the correct amount of time for a visit that does not produce exhaustion. The V&A contains fashion, ceramics, furniture, sculpture, textiles, jewellery, and design objects spanning five thousand years of human making, which means that every visitor will find something that is specifically for them and several things that they did not expect to find significant and do. The cafe in the garden is excellent. The garden itself is one of London’s better outdoor sitting spaces when the weather allows.
The Science Museum: Skip if Necessary
The Science Museum is excellent and is particularly excellent for children and for adults with specific interest in the history of technology and science. If you are managing your South Kensington time and have to choose two of three, the Natural History Museum and the V&A are the priority. Return to the Science Museum on a different day if you can.
Fiona MacLeod writes about London for visitors who want to see what the city actually is rather than what the postcards say it is. That means the Royal Mews and the Tate and the Borough Market and the things in the guidebooks, yes, but also the things around those things: the cafe on the back street that is better than the tourist cafe on the front street, the museum that is not the British Museum but is excellent and has no queue, the neighbourhood that is twenty minutes from the centre and is genuinely what London feels like when people live in it rather than visit it. She is here to help visitors have a better time than they would have without her, which is the most practical form of journalism available. For London visitor information, see Visit London. For London events, visit Time Out London. For London travel tips, see Evening Standard.
Fiona MacLeod has been writing about London for visitors since she arrived from Edinburgh fifteen years ago and found that the best London guide she could find was written by someone who had visited London twice and photographed Buckingham Palace from a distance both times. She has been trying to do better since, and the measure of success is visitors who write to her to say that the restaurant she recommended was actually good and the neighbourhood she described was actually worth an afternoon and the museum she said to skip was correctly assessed. London is too large and too interesting to waste time on the wrong things, and she is here to help you avoid wasting it.
Fiona MacLeod has been writing about London for visitors since she arrived from Edinburgh fifteen years ago and found that the best London guide she could find was written by someone who had visited London twice and photographed Buckingham Palace from a distance both times. She has been trying to do better since, and the measure of success is visitors who write to her to say that the restaurant she recommended was actually good and the neighbourhood she described was actually worth an afternoon and the museum she said to skip was correctly assessed. London is too large and too interesting to waste time on the wrong things, and she is here to help you avoid wasting it.
