London in February
Mar. 7th, 2009 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhythmaningI spent several days down south this month – in London and Oxford. On two different visits – so I am concatenating them
The first was a very good, though very emotional, visit.
For starters, I was met at King’s Cross by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
frankie_ecap, which was very good indeed.
After dropping my stuff off at the hotel, we decided to pay a visit to the Natural History Museum – or, if the last time you visited was in a professional capacity in the mid-1980s (to talk about ferns, if you are interested), the British Museum (Natural History). It is the same place, anyway.
It is a wonderful building; I spent a lot of my teenage years wandering around – it almost defines what I think a museum should be like. It might look like a train station – it was designed by Alfred Waterhouse at about the same time as Gilbert Scott designed St Pancras - but it also looks like a cathedral: walking through the large arched entrance into the grand hall is humbling.
What I really like about the building – more than the exhibits (although I do love the exhibits – particularly the blue whale; and the dinosaurs; and the fossils; and the giant squid – although they used to have a real giant squid, suspended in, I presume, formaldehyde: it wasn’t there, its place being taken by Chi Chi the stuffed toy, a cloakroom and a café) – are the carvings and mouldings: birds and insects climbing the walls, apes cavorting high above the atrium, and trilobites and giant lycopods. A lot of the carvings are hidden behind modern display cases – the ecology hall (which was quite interesting) has blinds hiding the carvings around the window; I surreptitiously moved the blinds to see what they were hiding.
In the main hall, several of the carved birds flying around the archways had been decapitated or lost their wings, which seemed a pity – although some wear and tear is only to be expected.
They have moved the statue of Richard Owen which presided over the main stairway has been replaced by one of Darwin – whether this is permanent or just to celebrate Darwin’s 200th anniversary, I’m not sure; Owen has been relegated to the shadows at the top of the stairs, a cheerless figure beneath which to embrace.
There were two guys measuring and fitting a sign below Darwin’s seated statue: it was a dedication by Andy Burnham, recognising Darwin’s achievement and celebrating the anniversary. It had a quotation from Darwin, which I really liked:
I did think the dinosaur exhibit was interesting – of course, it was always the dinosaurs that we gravitate to as small kids, and that hasn’t really changed. I was interested by the strange shaped irises in the eyes of the models of, I think, Allosaurus - curious dumbbell shapes; I was trying to work out how those would actually work. (All that happened was that I realised I didn’t understand how any non-round iris would work – how cats’ eyes manage to have a pointed oval iris, for instance. I understand how round irises might work – years of playing around with camera lenses has taught me that.)
There were several parties of schoolchildren running around, their teacher vainly trying to actually teach them something. “Now children,” said the teacher as they approached another model on the overhead walkway, “what’s this?” “Dinosaur!” came the chorused response. I think she was looking for a somewhat more specific answer.
The animatronics are excellent: the small Velociraptor-like pair that hang around the entrance to the walkway are particularly sinister. The huge animatronic Tyrannosaurus borrows heavily from the Jurassic Park movies - not necessarily a bad thing, and surely what the kids want, but it did feel a little more like commercialisation than science… (I was surprised that the Jurassic Park DVDs weren’t for sale in the shop. I had to stop myself buying a dinosaur skeleton – at a vast price!)
I went to the exhibition commemorating Darwin - the Big Idea. This was fascinating – although I suppose it was bound to entertain me. It mixed examples of Darwin’s collections (finches, iguanas, mockingbirds) with an examination of his writing, set in the context of his time, and the lasting impact of Darwin’s big idea – evolution through natural selection.
I have two quibbles: no mention of Gunnera, a wonderful plant which produces huge umbrella like leaves (if you have a really, really big umbrella), which Darwin saw and collected (long ago, I was told that he discovered one species, but I can’t verify that!). Indeed the exhibition was very animal-centric: there were a few pressed plant specimens that Darwin had collected, but no mention of how plants had effected his theories. Perhaps they didn’t.
More importantly, no mention at all of the ideas on phylogeny and systematics that really must have contributed to his thoughts on evolution. Lamarck, who so nearly got it right (and from whom Darwin borrowed some of his ideas) gets a mention, but Linnaeus - who mapped out the relationships between the common plant families, and whose classification is used as the basis for modern day taxonomy – didn’t get a mention. I cannot imagine that Darwin was ignorant of Linnaeus. Indeed, since Linnaeus had worked out the relationship between plant species, it is surprising that evolution took anyone by surprise.
The lack of plant specimens is actually a symptom of the museum as a whole. Perhaps it is just because animals are seen as more sexy; or perhaps it is because you can’t stuff plants, and Kew does living plants so well. But it is a bit steep that a Natural History Museum more or less ignores plants all together. I asked the information desk where I could find fossilised plants, and they directed me to a couple of specimens (stigmarian roots and Lepidodendron trunk, if you’re interested). There is a wealth of fossilised plant specimens! They are masses of fossil animals on show – all those sexy dinosaurs again – but no real plant exhibits. Perhaps I should start the campaign for real botany at the Natural History Museum – except of course, they do a whole lot of botany – they have a fine herbarium, and do a lot of plant research. It is just kept behind closed doors.
(OK, they do have the slice of Sequoia trunk too: that is fun. Lots of Japanese tourists came to stand by it whilst they had their photographs taken.
Leaving the museum, I noticed a balloon trapped in the entrance, a forgotten remnant of a Valentine’s party, perhaps; a deflated heart.
After spending a good long while in the Natural History Museum, we went back to Foxtrot Road, where I had been invited for supper.frankie_ecap cooked sausages and cabbage, which reminded me of a Dutch dish with an unpronounceable name (being Dutch) I once had in Brussels or Amsterdam or somewhere. It was much better than the last meal frankie_ecap cooked me. There was also excellent company with coughingbear and hano. And the cats, who seemed pretty sociable, at least until frankie_ecap started cooking.
frankie_ecap and I went to the Palladio exhibition. I had heard and watch programmes which said it was disappointing, and they were right. There was an awful lot to like about it – beautiful buildings, mostly – but the presentation made it seem really dead: there was no life in it at all. I thought the models were fascinating, but they seemed rather like ghosts. (The other day we went to the LondonTransport Museum, which used similar scale models, and those were full of life; so I don’t think it was the models per se – maybe that they weren’t painted, or maybe because they lacked little model people to provide a sense of scale, or maybe …) The whole exhibition was rather dark, presumably to protect Palladio’s exquisite sketches. There didn’t seem to be much explanation about why Palladio was so good an architect, or why those that followed him did so (and much of British Georgian architecture – including my home city of Edinburgh – is based on Palladian principals). The buildings looked beautiful, though.
At the end of the exhibition were several video presentations by modern architects and artists interpreting Palladio’s work. These were fascinating, and served to make the main exhibition seem even more disappointing – the curators could have done so much more to explain the architecture, to present their obvious passion for Palladio’s work, to an interested public (because why else were people there if they were not interested?). They blew it.
Friday started with a beautiful blue sky. I walked from where I was staying in less-than-salubrious King’s Cross to the station, and I was struck by the architecture – the sun and sky just made it shine.
We went to Tuttle Club the next day (named for Archibald “Harry” Tuttle…). This is a group of people who met online and decided to meet offline, too, and it seems to have blossomed into an open forum for people to go and discuss ideas and collaborate, mostly on web- or media ideas. It was a very interesting bunch of people, and since I like discussing ideas, I had a great time.
It was at Tuttle that I was finally convinced to start on Twitter, which I have been playing with a lot since. I’m still not sure I get it, though…
The first was a very good, though very emotional, visit.
For starters, I was met at King’s Cross by
frankie_ecap, which was very good indeed.After dropping my stuff off at the hotel, we decided to pay a visit to the Natural History Museum – or, if the last time you visited was in a professional capacity in the mid-1980s (to talk about ferns, if you are interested), the British Museum (Natural History). It is the same place, anyway.
It is a wonderful building; I spent a lot of my teenage years wandering around – it almost defines what I think a museum should be like. It might look like a train station – it was designed by Alfred Waterhouse at about the same time as Gilbert Scott designed St Pancras - but it also looks like a cathedral: walking through the large arched entrance into the grand hall is humbling.
What I really like about the building – more than the exhibits (although I do love the exhibits – particularly the blue whale; and the dinosaurs; and the fossils; and the giant squid – although they used to have a real giant squid, suspended in, I presume, formaldehyde: it wasn’t there, its place being taken by Chi Chi the stuffed toy, a cloakroom and a café) – are the carvings and mouldings: birds and insects climbing the walls, apes cavorting high above the atrium, and trilobites and giant lycopods. A lot of the carvings are hidden behind modern display cases – the ecology hall (which was quite interesting) has blinds hiding the carvings around the window; I surreptitiously moved the blinds to see what they were hiding.
In the main hall, several of the carved birds flying around the archways had been decapitated or lost their wings, which seemed a pity – although some wear and tear is only to be expected.
They have moved the statue of Richard Owen which presided over the main stairway has been replaced by one of Darwin – whether this is permanent or just to celebrate Darwin’s 200th anniversary, I’m not sure; Owen has been relegated to the shadows at the top of the stairs, a cheerless figure beneath which to embrace.
There were two guys measuring and fitting a sign below Darwin’s seated statue: it was a dedication by Andy Burnham, recognising Darwin’s achievement and celebrating the anniversary. It had a quotation from Darwin, which I really liked:
”Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follows from the advance of sciences.”
I did think the dinosaur exhibit was interesting – of course, it was always the dinosaurs that we gravitate to as small kids, and that hasn’t really changed. I was interested by the strange shaped irises in the eyes of the models of, I think, Allosaurus - curious dumbbell shapes; I was trying to work out how those would actually work. (All that happened was that I realised I didn’t understand how any non-round iris would work – how cats’ eyes manage to have a pointed oval iris, for instance. I understand how round irises might work – years of playing around with camera lenses has taught me that.)
There were several parties of schoolchildren running around, their teacher vainly trying to actually teach them something. “Now children,” said the teacher as they approached another model on the overhead walkway, “what’s this?” “Dinosaur!” came the chorused response. I think she was looking for a somewhat more specific answer.
The animatronics are excellent: the small Velociraptor-like pair that hang around the entrance to the walkway are particularly sinister. The huge animatronic Tyrannosaurus borrows heavily from the Jurassic Park movies - not necessarily a bad thing, and surely what the kids want, but it did feel a little more like commercialisation than science… (I was surprised that the Jurassic Park DVDs weren’t for sale in the shop. I had to stop myself buying a dinosaur skeleton – at a vast price!)
I went to the exhibition commemorating Darwin - the Big Idea. This was fascinating – although I suppose it was bound to entertain me. It mixed examples of Darwin’s collections (finches, iguanas, mockingbirds) with an examination of his writing, set in the context of his time, and the lasting impact of Darwin’s big idea – evolution through natural selection.
I have two quibbles: no mention of Gunnera, a wonderful plant which produces huge umbrella like leaves (if you have a really, really big umbrella), which Darwin saw and collected (long ago, I was told that he discovered one species, but I can’t verify that!). Indeed the exhibition was very animal-centric: there were a few pressed plant specimens that Darwin had collected, but no mention of how plants had effected his theories. Perhaps they didn’t.
More importantly, no mention at all of the ideas on phylogeny and systematics that really must have contributed to his thoughts on evolution. Lamarck, who so nearly got it right (and from whom Darwin borrowed some of his ideas) gets a mention, but Linnaeus - who mapped out the relationships between the common plant families, and whose classification is used as the basis for modern day taxonomy – didn’t get a mention. I cannot imagine that Darwin was ignorant of Linnaeus. Indeed, since Linnaeus had worked out the relationship between plant species, it is surprising that evolution took anyone by surprise.
The lack of plant specimens is actually a symptom of the museum as a whole. Perhaps it is just because animals are seen as more sexy; or perhaps it is because you can’t stuff plants, and Kew does living plants so well. But it is a bit steep that a Natural History Museum more or less ignores plants all together. I asked the information desk where I could find fossilised plants, and they directed me to a couple of specimens (stigmarian roots and Lepidodendron trunk, if you’re interested). There is a wealth of fossilised plant specimens! They are masses of fossil animals on show – all those sexy dinosaurs again – but no real plant exhibits. Perhaps I should start the campaign for real botany at the Natural History Museum – except of course, they do a whole lot of botany – they have a fine herbarium, and do a lot of plant research. It is just kept behind closed doors.
(OK, they do have the slice of Sequoia trunk too: that is fun. Lots of Japanese tourists came to stand by it whilst they had their photographs taken.
Leaving the museum, I noticed a balloon trapped in the entrance, a forgotten remnant of a Valentine’s party, perhaps; a deflated heart.
After spending a good long while in the Natural History Museum, we went back to Foxtrot Road, where I had been invited for supper.
frankie_ecap cooked sausages and cabbage, which reminded me of a Dutch dish with an unpronounceable name (being Dutch) I once had in Brussels or Amsterdam or somewhere. It was much better than the last meal frankie_ecap cooked me. There was also excellent company with coughingbear and hano. And the cats, who seemed pretty sociable, at least until frankie_ecap started cooking.frankie_ecap and I went to the Palladio exhibition. I had heard and watch programmes which said it was disappointing, and they were right. There was an awful lot to like about it – beautiful buildings, mostly – but the presentation made it seem really dead: there was no life in it at all. I thought the models were fascinating, but they seemed rather like ghosts. (The other day we went to the LondonTransport Museum, which used similar scale models, and those were full of life; so I don’t think it was the models per se – maybe that they weren’t painted, or maybe because they lacked little model people to provide a sense of scale, or maybe …) The whole exhibition was rather dark, presumably to protect Palladio’s exquisite sketches. There didn’t seem to be much explanation about why Palladio was so good an architect, or why those that followed him did so (and much of British Georgian architecture – including my home city of Edinburgh – is based on Palladian principals). The buildings looked beautiful, though.At the end of the exhibition were several video presentations by modern architects and artists interpreting Palladio’s work. These were fascinating, and served to make the main exhibition seem even more disappointing – the curators could have done so much more to explain the architecture, to present their obvious passion for Palladio’s work, to an interested public (because why else were people there if they were not interested?). They blew it.
Friday started with a beautiful blue sky. I walked from where I was staying in less-than-salubrious King’s Cross to the station, and I was struck by the architecture – the sun and sky just made it shine.
We went to Tuttle Club the next day (named for Archibald “Harry” Tuttle…). This is a group of people who met online and decided to meet offline, too, and it seems to have blossomed into an open forum for people to go and discuss ideas and collaborate, mostly on web- or media ideas. It was a very interesting bunch of people, and since I like discussing ideas, I had a great time.
It was at Tuttle that I was finally convinced to start on Twitter, which I have been playing with a lot since. I’m still not sure I get it, though…
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-03-07 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-07 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-07 06:38 pm (UTC)1) I have no idea what used to be in the space now occupied by the the cafe, but our giant squid - the most complete specimen (possibly the only complete specimen?) in a museum's collection - was collected around 2002 and is currently stored in the Darwin Centre: viewable if you go on a Darwin centre tour. Sadly, the size of the case in which she's preserved makes it too heavy for the floors in the museum proper, and we can't reinforce the building without doing irreparable damage to the precious architecture.
2) Darwin used to be on the central staircase, but was replaced with Owen to commemorate an anniversary concerning the museum's founder. I don't know if they plan to swap the statues again after Darwin 200.
3) There are some fine plant fossils on display on the first floor of the Red Zone, and if you come back in the summer months, the garden will be open. I'd really like to see more of our specimens on display, but like the entomology collections, they're particularly vulnerable to light.
Apparently I can't get out of museum mode, even when I'm at home.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-07 07:03 pm (UTC)I thought the giant squid would have been with the marine invertebrates, but all they had there was a (very fine) model. I didn't try asking at the information desk since they hadn't succeeded in pointing me in the direction of more than two plant fossils.
The information people completely failed to direct me to the first floor of the red zone. I had looked at the map, too. Oh well, I'll just have to go back sometime...
Actually, next on my list of revisiting old childhood haunts is going to be the Science Museum.
And thanks for pointing out that the statue of Darwin has always been there - it certainly felt like it had. I read somewhere that they had moved Darwin especially for the celebrations - not that they were moving him back!
It really is a wonderful place.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-07 07:07 pm (UTC)Like I say, I'll have to go back!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-09 10:12 am (UTC)btw, I think the dish you have in mind is Stoemp?
no subject
Date: 2009-03-09 10:27 am (UTC)Looking up stoemp, Wikipedia says it is pureed or mashed potatoes, other root vegetables and can also include cream, bacon, herbs or spices (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoemp); I'm remembering something much more cabbagey-with-sausages. I might well be mistaken!