What I did On My Holidays - Part 2.
18 Aug 2013 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
curiouswombatThis is the first post about what I got up to once I moved from Coventry down to London. D-d flew in to London City Airport and met me at out hotel in time for dinner on Sunday evening. We were staying at The Radisson Blu Vanderbilt about 3 minutes walk from the Natural History Museum, 5 minutes from th V&A, and about 15 minutes from Kensington Palace. We got a really nice bed and breakfast deal which included an Oyster Card with £10 on it (extremely useful for travelling on the tube), afternoon tea, and free entry to Kensington Palace - which had been on our to-do list anyway.
So on Monday we went down to breakfast (and as I mentioned in the short post made at the time, got scolded by the waitress for not eating enough!), and then walked to Kensington Gardens, and thence to the Palace.
Under the cut are pictures of the gardens, and a few taken inside, but none of the costume ones- I will post those separately tomorrow as it would, otherwise, have been a very long post.
So - we walked towards the palace, and I got the weird sensation that it was... too flat...
I did wonder if it was my glasses or something, until we got a little closer...
And I realised that it really was a 2 dimensional image! There is building work at this end of the palace, and a large drawing of the palace covers all the scaffolding so that the view across the park is unaltered!
Those are pretty impressive gates, aren't they? But we walked around the corner towards the public entrance - which is not swathed in scaffolding and art-work.
Here is a rather nice statue of Queen Victoria -
Everyone seemed to be taking pictures of her head-on - but I rather like the profile shot.
It was about 9.50am by then - but the palace doesn't open until 10.00 - so we went for a stroll in the gardens -
And I found a rather smaller gate I rather like -
Here is the Tudor rose from the centre -
The doors having opened, and the twenty or so people who were waiting on the steps having gone in, we made our way towards the palace. This view caught my eye -
The cranes looked to me rather like stick insects or praying mantis(es?) or something.
Once inside we found that the public areas are well laid out, with four clearly defined 'routes' each covering a different period of the history, and each leading you back to a central area where you could get your bearings and then choose which route to follow next.
I mainly took pictures of some of the clothing on display - including dresses belonging to the Queen, Princess Margaret, and Diane Princess of Wales (usually referred to in our family as Dead Di).
But, as I said, I will post those tomorrow. In the meantime - here is a house of cards, built in the fireplace in the room where George 2nd often played cards -
D-d looked at it for a minute and then pointed out to me that I needed to look closely at the ground floor -
Yes - the house of cards has a rather beautiful loo!
And in the next room, really just a way between two other rooms, there was a display cabinet in which we spotted this -
A hand-knitted crown! There was a knitted sceptre too, but it was even harder to photograph. As was the notice that pointed out that they were replicas and not part of the actual crown jewels :)
In another room we saw an excellent display about the Great Exhibition - including a small book called 'The ABC of the Great Exhibition', that began 'A is for Artificial Limbs' and included a line or two about many of the weird and wonderful exhibits - I really like this one -
Sadly they didn't sell it in the palace bookshop - I would certainly have bought a copy!
And so - tomorrow - dresses, lots of dresses.
So on Monday we went down to breakfast (and as I mentioned in the short post made at the time, got scolded by the waitress for not eating enough!), and then walked to Kensington Gardens, and thence to the Palace.
Under the cut are pictures of the gardens, and a few taken inside, but none of the costume ones- I will post those separately tomorrow as it would, otherwise, have been a very long post.
So - we walked towards the palace, and I got the weird sensation that it was... too flat...
I did wonder if it was my glasses or something, until we got a little closer...
And I realised that it really was a 2 dimensional image! There is building work at this end of the palace, and a large drawing of the palace covers all the scaffolding so that the view across the park is unaltered!
Those are pretty impressive gates, aren't they? But we walked around the corner towards the public entrance - which is not swathed in scaffolding and art-work.
Here is a rather nice statue of Queen Victoria -
Everyone seemed to be taking pictures of her head-on - but I rather like the profile shot.
It was about 9.50am by then - but the palace doesn't open until 10.00 - so we went for a stroll in the gardens -
And I found a rather smaller gate I rather like -
Here is the Tudor rose from the centre -
The doors having opened, and the twenty or so people who were waiting on the steps having gone in, we made our way towards the palace. This view caught my eye -
The cranes looked to me rather like stick insects or praying mantis(es?) or something.
Once inside we found that the public areas are well laid out, with four clearly defined 'routes' each covering a different period of the history, and each leading you back to a central area where you could get your bearings and then choose which route to follow next.
I mainly took pictures of some of the clothing on display - including dresses belonging to the Queen, Princess Margaret, and Diane Princess of Wales (usually referred to in our family as Dead Di).
But, as I said, I will post those tomorrow. In the meantime - here is a house of cards, built in the fireplace in the room where George 2nd often played cards -
D-d looked at it for a minute and then pointed out to me that I needed to look closely at the ground floor -
Yes - the house of cards has a rather beautiful loo!
And in the next room, really just a way between two other rooms, there was a display cabinet in which we spotted this -
A hand-knitted crown! There was a knitted sceptre too, but it was even harder to photograph. As was the notice that pointed out that they were replicas and not part of the actual crown jewels :)
In another room we saw an excellent display about the Great Exhibition - including a small book called 'The ABC of the Great Exhibition', that began 'A is for Artificial Limbs' and included a line or two about many of the weird and wonderful exhibits - I really like this one -
Sadly they didn't sell it in the palace bookshop - I would certainly have bought a copy!
And so - tomorrow - dresses, lots of dresses.
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Date: 19/08/2013 07:37 am (UTC)The crown was just in a display in a glass fronted cupboard in a bit of corridor - but it caught our eye and we both thought it was wonderful.