Let’s pick up where we left off in Hyde Park. Running through more or less the middle of this Royal Garden is a manmade lake known as the Serpentine, so named for its twisting shape. Along the Serpentine, there are cafes and tea rooms, ice cream stands, places to rent paddle boats, even a little roped-off area for swimming.
Also populating the Serpentine in great numbers are geese and ducks, terns and gulls, songbirds, herons, and especially, swans.
Several kinds of swans, even.
Swans are known for being graceful and elegant birds…
… geese, less so.
Further east, towards the Kensington Gardens, is the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.
This is an oval waterway set into a gentle hill; water flows down both sides to pool at the lowest end and be pumped back to the highest.
Around the 165×260 foot loop of Cornish granite are areas with different textures and geometries, as well as jets of water or air bubbles. Signs welcome visitors to paddle their hands or feet in the water.
From the south exit between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, I walked to the Victoria & Albert Museum, which holds a collection of 4.5 million works of decorative art and design. It contains a spectacular array of art from around the globe, with a particularly beautiful collection of Islamic art from the 7th to 20th centuries, including tile, painting, calligraphy, and textiles such as the 16th century Ardabil Carpet.
While there, I had a cup of tea and an Earl Grey infused scone in their Renaissance-style Centre Refreshment Room, built in 1865.
Again, a walk—by this time, I was getting pretty tired—to the Natural History Museum, a few blocks further down Exhibition Road.
This cathedral of nature stands in testament to 300 years of research and progress in the natural sciences, beginning with the collections of Irish doctor Sir Hans Sloane, and including specimens gathered by the likes of Sir Charles Darwin and Sir Richard Owen.
From the ceiling of the central hall hangs a ten-ton blue whale skeleton.
Displays throughout the museum include skeletons, taxidermied animals, and specimens of thousands of organisms preserved in glass jars, some more than a hundred years old.
Until early 2017, a Diplodocus skeleton was suspended in the hall. The blue whale, stranded in Ireland in the late 1800s and kept in storage for some 42 years before finding a home in the museum’s Large Mammals wing, was unveiled in July.
From the back of the hall, framed by staircases that lead deeper into the museum, Charles Darwin surveys his domain.
… some would say, judgmentally.
You can take the stairs up…
… and around to the front of the hall, to view the whale and your fellow tourists from above.
The museum is really built like a palace or a church, with striking red brick and carved details in the unlikeliest of places.
Next up: the British Museum and a very good dog.
