It’s no secret that Londoners spend most of their spare time avoiding tourists and the areas they frequent.
Buckingham Palace and the
Big Ben will still be there next month, along with all the other attractions we’re used to seeing on postcards. But are we missing out purely because we don’t want to be tourists in our own city?
Spend the day…
Not at one of the big museums like the
British Museum, the
Science Museum, the
V&A or the
Tate, all of which you probably visited at least once when you first moved to London. Instead, check out London’s smaller, lesser known collections. There are cartoons of an adult nature at the
Cartoon Museum (adult as in not for children, rather than X-rated); for war memorabilia head to the
Imperial War Museum or the
RAF Museum, or to learn more about the city’s past there is the
Museum of London near Old Street. The Underground also has its very own exhibition space at the
London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. There are more obscure collections too, which include things like the Chinese torture chairs and chastity belt at the Welcome Collection, the organs preserved in jars of the Hunterian Museum, and the post-mortem sets at the Royal London Museum, which is part of Barts Hospital. But before you start to worry that there is nothing to do with the kids, consider taking the little ones to look at the Star Wars set at the
London Film Museum, the insect specimens at the
Horniman Museum, or to visit the animals at a city farm – just don’t go to
Richmond Park expecting to see deer, they’re notoriously shy. The farm at Spitalfields has a Shetland pony and a donkey, and that’s got to be a lot more interesting than looking at old oil paintings.
