The Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green is an old friend - we've taken the Boys at least twice. But it has now reopened after having been closed for two years, now calling itself Young V&A and I, for one, wanted to see what they had done to it. The Boys are probably a bit old for it now - they are 13 and almost 10, but I thought, well, we can always snark....
We had originally been going to meet them at Liverpool Street Station at 11:20, but their mother said she'd gathered you really needed to be there before 11 if you weren't going to have to queue for hours, so we met them at 10:20 (the time their train comes in on the Overground) instead, and went straight to the Central Line for the one stop to Bethnal Green. There was no queue to get in, but we were very glad we had gone so early, as on our way out, at nearly noon, the queue snaked about round the block!
The Swan Whisperer was desperate for coffee, so we went to the museum café first of all, and he and the Boys all had coffee while I, adequately caffeinated for one day, had fizzy water. Then we set off to explore - the first gallery we went to was aimed at children learning their letters and colours. Round the other side of that floor, there were a lot of familiar exhibits, mostly with rather dumbed-down captions, inviting visitors to imagine they were doing thus and so. The Rachel Whiteread dolls houses are still there, in a section called "Small Worlds", and I think the original ones - the ones that used to be in the V&A until the 1970s - were still there, but I didn't see them. There were also Sindys and Barbys, and lots of other dolls and miniature things.
Then we went up to the second floor where they had the Design Galleries, aimed slightly more at people the Boys' age; this had a lot of seemingly random things, but grouped by type - shedloads of scooters, including a Microscooter that had a built-in suitcase! Then all kinds of other design objects, from clothes to toothbrushes! The Boys were beginning to flag by then and needing what they will insist on calling "the bathroom" - I enquired whether they planned to have a bath! We eventually all used the facilities and came away, very glad that we had gone so relatively early.
It wasn't nearly as bad as I expected, and certainly looks fresh and new, with a more airy feel to it. I think I should like to go back on my own one day in term time so that I can take as long as I want to look at things.
The Boy had asked if we could have lunch in Spitalfields Market, so we got a bus there, and spent awhile wandering around the market and deciding what to eat. Finally we settled on the pasta restaurant that Boy Two said he'd been to before and really liked, and after filling up on pasta, we went to find the place where they were doing rolled ice-cream, which the Boy badly wanted to try (so did I!); I did a video of one being made which I'll post on Facebook. It was fun to watch the ice cream being made, but really, when push came to shove, it was just rather good ice-cream, really!
We then had to decide how to spend the afternoon. I had read about a walk called the 10 ages of London and we decided to do that. A quick bus down to London Bridge started the walk in prehistory - only the Thames is left from then, and it was very different. Then the Romans - we enjoyed seeing where the Roman bridge was, and a model of the mediaeval bridge in the church of St Magnus the Martyr - there was also a piece of wood that they think was part of the original bridge and whose tree would have been alive in Jesus' day! We walked past the office building that contains the Roman baths - not available to visit today - and up to All-Hallows-by-the-Tower where we admired the Saxon arch.
On past St Olave's with its three skulls above the gateway (mediaeval),
and then to St Andrew Undershaft for the Tudors.
A brisk walk then, past Fenchurch Street station (none of us had been there before, and I was gutted that my photo of it didn't come out) and across Eastcheap to Pudding Lane (both the Boy and I wanted to call it Pudding Mill Lane, but that is somewhere different!) where the Great Fire of London infamously broke out, and out the other end to Monument. This, of course, was the Stuart era.
The guided walk suggested going on down to find the only pub that is said to have survived the Great Fire (and, of course, the Blitz), but both Boy Too and I had Had Enough by then, so we decided Monument would have to Do for the Stuarts, and we ended up walking up King William Street to the Bank junction, where we could see the Mansion House (Georgian) and the Royal Exchange (Victorian), and we decided that we had seen more than enough 20th- and 21st-century buildings to count! So we got on a bus back to Liverpool Street Station, where we got some refreshments and then met the Daughter for a quick cup of tea before she took the Boys home, and we wearily clambered on to the next homebound 35. Both of us fell asleep on the bus, and how the Swan Whisperer thinks he'll have the energy to go to dance club, I do not know!
Meanwhile, I have never put quite so many links in one blog post before! There will be more photos on Facebook.
