#museum trips

[adaines-furious-feast]

Westminster Abbey

So yesterday I went to Westminster Abbey. Yeah, the place famous for sometimes our really rich “important” people do stuff there. It cost £30. It was effectively my birthday present, so here’s a sort of review/experience/thing.

Westminster Abbey from the entrance

The main quire (yeah, where the choir sits)

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

Tomb of Elizabeth the First

Stained glass windows from the Chapter House

Pyx Chamber (one of the oldest parts of the abbey)

Coronation chair

I took so many more photos though. Might share some of the prettier ones.

First of all, there’s a free audio tour. When you enter, you’re given a little tablet and some headphones. This is the first time I had seen something like this. I know other places I’ve been to have audio tours, but you have to download an app and have your own headphones. Which I don’t super have. So this was nice, and the tour came in a bunch of different languages. I found it really informative and made a big difference. I actually knew what I was looking at without having to buy some guide or whatever.

That said, it didn’t tell you everything. 

So there are tons of famous people buried at Westminster Abbey. Some of them you’ve heard of, some of them you haven’t. Most of them are noted by grave markers on the floor, almost all of which you can walk over. The only one you can’t walk over is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which I thought was quite nice. But at the same time some of these markers are so old, and the abbey has been visited so many times that the text is really worn down and hard to read sometimes. There were so many markers that I simply could not read. 

Sometimes it was really easy to miss a famous marker. One of the first you come across as you follow the flow of the tour is Charles Darwin, but nobody else around me even seemed to notice him as we walked around. Isaac Newton, however, did get a lot of attention, because he also had a statue, so that was nice.

There is really so much history in this building and I’d have loved it if there was a special guide for true nerds. I paid £30, I want to know everything, not just the highlights. (And if there is one for it to be super obvious). For example, I’d gone through a list of graves at the abbey beforehand, and I knew that George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham had a tomb here and had that on my checklist (Yes, I watch Jack Rackam, yes “Am I right Villiers?” is part of my vocabulary). I think maybe there are two people visiting the museum a day that care about someone like this random duke, so I get why it wouldn’t be pointed out on the general audio tour, but it would be nice to have a detailed tour for people like me. 

Anyway, getting ahead of myself. So you follow the path around to the Quire, High Alter, and Cosmati Pavement. Giving myself away as someone fascinated by royal ceremonies (I wouldn’t call myself a fan of the royal family, I just find the ceremonies interesting), but it was cool looking at places and being like “oh I recognise this from the wedding” or “oh I recognise this from the meme about the Queen being vulnerable to an attack from the Bishop”. 

You go around the shrine to Edward the Confessor, which you cannot see. That brings me to another point. You are not going to get good views of most of the tombs of medieval/Tudor monarchs. For Eddie, the tomb and area surrounding it is so old and delicate (according to the audio tour) that it’s not accessible to the general public. Which I understand. It’s like a thousand years old, it’s kind of wild that we can go around the building at all. It would have been nice if there was a way to view all of this from above. Of course, this is still an active church, so constructing a second level walkway would be pretty hard, especially, again, because this is a thousand year old building and construction work can’t exactly just be done. You have to balance the preservation to being able to put things out on display in any museum and I’m glad it’s not my job to decide. 

Other than old Eddie, you can see the tombs of, say Queen Elizabeth I or a bunch of Henrys, but they’re all very high up. Some of the oldest ones are so high you have to look up even to the base of them, while Lizzie you can’t really see the tomb effigy clearly. Or I couldn’t, but then I’m not that tall. This isn’t so much a complaint as a thing you should be aware of. You’re probably not going to be able to get a photo like you see online, unless you bring a selfie stick (which you’re not supposed to do according to the website but people definitely did).

You then follow through the Ladies chapel, where you have in a side chapel Elizabeth 1st and the corner of the innocents (or something like that). Basically a place where royal children were buried. And (drum roll) the skeletons of two children found at the Tower of London. Duh duh duh!

Are these the Princes in the Tower? Well the audio guide gave a definitive yes. You wouldn’t even know there was any debate about it, as simple as saying Elizbaeth and Mary 1 were in the chapel too. But we don’t know. There hasn’t been any testing and we don’t know that they’re the only kids to have died in the tower (ok, we don’t even know for certain they did die in the tower but, like, I don’t know for certain there’s water in my toilet right now but I’d be shocked to find out there isn’t). So it was kind of weird that the audio tour was so “yes, that’s the princes in the tower, moving on”. 

Anyway, back around to Poet’s Corner, where there is a memorial to William Shakespeare and a bunch of other writers. This is where the audio tour ends, but you can carry on to the cloisters and some of the oldest parts of the building. Again, the history nerd in me wishes the tour had carried on.

Back into the Abbey, you see the coronation chair (the one for crowning a king, not for watching Coronation Street) and then out into the overpriced giftshop.

Just before the exit, there is a place to write a prayer which will be said in the Shrine of Edward the Confessor, and a place to light a candle. I did. Maybe that makes me lame. I’m not a CoE christian but hey, if I write asking for a prayer for people hated for their race, religion, gender or sexual identity then at least the person who has to read these reads it and maybe thinks about it for a moment. I can’t change the world, I can change a moment, you know?

Anyway, it’s a really pretty building. If you’re interested in medieval architecture, or tomb effigies or British (mostly English) history this was really interesting. And you will get some nice photos if you’re half decent with a camera (I am not). 

There is a museum but that’s £5 extra. Yes, I did already pay £30 to get in and I could have splurged an extra £5 for the museum but a) I didn’t have that money and b) I kind of didn’t want to on principle. I already paid a tonne of money (to me). I didn’t want to pay more. And there were signs asking for donations to add something to celebrate the king’s coronation or something like that. And I just… nah.

Accessibility

Oh boy.

Ok, so they do warn you ahead of time and on the audio tour that the floor is uneven and to be careful. I only tripped once (which is a miracle for me, maybe there is a god), but I also have my super grippy shoes. 

Worse than it being uneven are the steps. There are some parts of the building that you cannot access if you cannot go up steps. These include the lady’s chapel and some of the side chapels. There are also some narrow spaces. It’s a lot like All-Hallows-By-The-Tower. I understand this is a 1000 year old building and Confessing Eddie wasn’t thinking about “oh I have to make sure a wheelchair user can go here”. They apparently weren’t even thinking about handrails. But it just sucks. On the upside, tickets for “registered disabled” visitors are free. On the downside, “registered”. I don’t know exactly if they’re checking. Like, could a foreign tourist in a wheelchair get a free ticket even if they’re not on any local registers? How visible would that disability have to be before they’re like “yeah go ahead”? So once again, worth checking ahead. 

The audio tour does have a BSL version, according to the website, which is cool. 

And now, the thing you have been waiting for - seating!

Honestly I thought the level of seating available was pretty good. There mostly isn’t much seating around the shrine and lady’s chapel areas (although there were definitely people sitting in places they weren’t supposed to be), but there was lots in the main part of the building.

So that was it. Would I go again? Maybe if I got a lot richer soon. It was worth £30 for the one off trip, but when you consider there are places like the British Museum and National Gallery that are free, I think there are better ways to spend your money in London if you’re on a budget. I wouldn’t say I regret it, but next time I’m looking to spend birthday money I won’t be like “should I go someplace new, or should I go to the Abbey again” (Tower of London, I want to do Tower of London next).

[crampedfingers]

sketches from the musee des beaux-arts last spring that i never posted :)

[museumnerdery]

Greetings, fellow travelers! 🌎

On this blog you will find wild stories, stunning photos, quotes, random gossip, whimsy & snark, from staff and visitors to:

Museums 🏛️

Science centers 🔭

Zoos 🐼

Aquariums 🦈

Botanical gardens 🌿

& related institutions.

I have some stories of my own to tell, and I want to hear about your experiences in these places, too!

EDIT, July 19, 2025:

I had big plans for this blog, but as often happens, life got in the way. (Also the rise of an authoritarian government where I live.) I do hope to start posting actual original content soon!

If you don't want to miss one of my random posts, you can click on the meatball menu on my homepage and select "Get notifications."

Abbreviated bio under the cut.

About me: I just took early retirement after working for more than 25 years as the web designer, editor, and photographer for a natural history museum. I have degrees in anthropology and museum studies. I had graduate assistantships in various departments of the university museum where I was working towards my degree. Before that, I worked as a general assistant in a small science museum. Earlier still, I volunteered at a science & nature center.

My parents were both scientists - a biologist and a physicist. They both loved to travel, and we did a lot of that when I was a kid. We took a few cross-country road trips in the US, and also took trips to Canada, France, the UK and Switzerland. I've done limited travel on my own to Germany, France, the UK, and Denmark. I've been to museums and similar places on most of these trips. I plan to share my thoughts on those experiences here.

Please join me in exploring the world of museums!

[outsassing-nero]

18.03.19// another conference with lovely feedback on the weekend! time to review a paper and edit two others to send them in next week. also about to grab some kbeauty items & preorder the bts album

[adaines-furious-feast]

London Museum Docklands

Back at it again with another museum review.

Actual review and a lot of thoughts on accessibility undercut.

Dockyard museum, housed in a warehouse built in 1802

Part of the mock 1800s Dockland gallery

A portrait of Beeston Long, slave owner and part of the Long Family, which owned some of the largest slave plantations in Jamaica. The fabric is Caribbean Madras cloth. The gallery on slavery makes it clear this was a terrible thing, and paintings of slave owners and traders weren't presented in a "these were successful business men who owned huge farms and were very wealthy (and also owned slaves)". The fact they owned enslaved people came first and was the most important thing about them. However, paintings of these people still glorified them on their own, having been made when they were alive. So portraits like this one obviously made people uncomfortable. (According to signage), the museum listened to criticism from people understanding the need to present history, but worried about this effect where even if the words criticised them, the images didn't. The decision to cover half the painting with this symbolically significant cloth came from an action during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, when a statue of slave trader Robert Milligan was covered with a cloth given to a protester from a friend of Jamaican heritage. The effect is that you cannot look at this man without looking at the culture of the people he enslaved.

Stevedores' Banner: a banner used during the dock worker strikes of the late 1800s and early 1900s. This one was produced circa 1904 and shows a London stevedore (dock worker who loads and unloads ships) shaking hands with an Australian "wharfie" (a waterside worker or labourer)

Review!

So, London Museum Docklands. Where to start?

Aesthetically it looks so cool. It’s located in one of the old warehouse buildings in the London docks. So you’re in this 200 year old building that has seen a lot of history. Inside there are some “original features”, lots of beams, but it’s not some rickety old warehouse. That said, some areas are stylized in a way to give the impression that you’re walking through the past.

I’m from Coventry, and if you’re from Coventry you’ve been to the Coventry Transport Museum on school trips about a dozen times, and you know that means walking through a section that’s set up to mimic a street from (I want to say) the 1800s, complete with wax works and the smell of horses. So there weren’t any wax works here and I didn’t smell horses, but there were streets set up to resemble the Docklands during the 1800s and that was really nostalgic for me.

Apart from that, it’s really educational. Starting at the top of the building, you’re taken through some 400 years of London, British, and Empire history, straight through to modern protests against redevelopment and a “funeral for the community”. So there is a lot to learn. 

Speaking of learning. This is a very family friendly museum. While most of the information being provided was geared towards adults, throughout the museum there are displays and activities for children under 10.

On the one hand I think this is great. Children should be able to learn outside the classroom, and it’s just generally good for there to be free stuff for families to do outside the house. That doesn’t happen all that much anymore. But, man, is it loud a lot. That’s a me problem rather than a kids problem. They shouldn’t have to be quiet and “be seen and not heard”. But by the end of the museum I was overwhelmed by the noise. Also, maybe it’s just me but it can feel a little awkward when you’re a single adult looking at something in an area with a lot of kids. Again, this is a me problem rather than a kids problem, and for the most part it wasn’t a problem at all. And maybe if we had more spaces like this it would feel less awkward. I don't know. (Also I’m going in, like, the last week of the school holidays, so it was probably busier than normal).

One thing about the kid oriented displays is that it could be a little jarring. Especially (really only) in the gallery about slavery. 

Obviously if you’re going to talk about London Docklands, you have to talk about slavery. You can’t be like “this is how we weighed all the sugar, this is how the sugar was moved away from the Docklands, this is all the other stuff we imported” without talking about how we got all that sugar so cheap. 

Sugar, London & Slavery was the third main exhibit in the museum and I think it tackled the subject really well. They worked with Black Britons to produce a short film and art work about what it means to be Black and British today, from the slave trade, to the Windrush generation, and to now. 

It was all very factual, didn’t fall into the trap of being like “oh we were so evil!” but also didn’t shy away from saying what the objectively evil things done were. This included first the actual kidnapping of Africans for slavery, and the slavery in British colonies, and then even after abolition the "apprenticeships" of Black people, and people from the colonies in Asia. You could tell they put a lot of thought into the gallery.

There were some jarring moments. At one point there’s a little panel at child height asking “how old do you think enslaved people had to be before they started this extremely dangerous job” with little pieces of cloth hiding the answer. I’m not saying the target age group of that panel is too young to be learning about slavery, but it just felt so out of place to have this baby pink little “flip to uncover the answers” thing right next to a panel about the horrific reality of slavery. Maybe it’s supposed to be. Maybe it’s meant to make adults think about how young the enslaved people were. Maybe I’m thinking too much about it.

One thing that was definitely not intentional is that you could occasionally hear the really jolly Sailor’s Hornpipe on the other side of a fake wall coming from another exhibit and it was really weird.

So overall I enjoyed the museum but when I was finished I didn’t feel like “man I wish there was more to see! I can’t wait to come back”.

Accessibility

Being in this old building, there were some less than smooth surfaces. Especially in the 1800s mock-street section which had cobble stones in part. What was most frustrating is that you couldn’t easily skip parts like that.

So, the way the museum is laid out, you take the main lift/stairs to the top floor, and then follow through the galleries from the start of the docklands through to the end of the slavery section. You are then supposed to take another set of stairs or a one-level lift down to the second floor. But the lift when I went wasn’t working. “Sorry for any inconvenience” is one of the most infuriating signs I see. 

So I had to come back through the entire first level of the museum to go to the main lift to go down one floor. But that lift doesn’t take you to the place where you’re supposed to start this level. It takes you to the end. So you either have to work backwards through this gallery to get back to where you start, and then walk back through because there's no exit there, or walk through to the beginning and then work your way through the exhibit. Either way you're taking a lot of steps.

A side door did allow me to skip the first couple of galleries, but I still had to go through the 1800s mock up twice, which was probably the least accessible area with low lighting and an uneven flooring. There was also ambient sound being played which made it sound like there were voices coming from another room, or the sound of the ocean or people working, which might be triggering for some people (I know I struggle with what I can best describe as disembodied sound, and I don’t even have that many auditory hallucinations). 

According to the website, you can ask a member of staff to be able to skip this area and they’ll take you on a different route. It just would have been great to have that route indicated in person. Going back to the Coventry Transport museum, I remember there being a “if you don’t want to go through the Blitz simulation, go this way” (yeah we had a Blitz simulation. Definitely a great place to send school kids every year).

One upside, folding stools were provided at the start of the galleries.

Other accessibility points I noticed: while there were some plaques with braille on them, this wasn’t anywhere near common. I’m not sure if there were audio descriptions of all the many, many information panels throughout the museum, and you just had to ask for them. The website does say that magnifying glasses are available at the information desk.

The website has a good deal of accessibility information to be honest. In fact, more details than I have here seeing as apparently there were sound effects in some parts of the museum which I did not hear. The website also has maps showing the sensory levels of different places and a step by step guide of what to expect in each part of the museum. Would loved to have had these on hand in the museum itself.

Anyway, I’ve written like 1500 words on this museum that maybe half a dozen people here will read but hey, if you read all this hello my favourite animals are jellyfish and I wish I was one.

[adaines-furious-feast]

Freemasons Museum

Did you know there's a Museum of Freemasonry in the heart of London? And it's free to go to?

Talking about experiences and accessibility under cut:

Grand Master's throne (1791), created to mark the election of George, Prince of Wales (later George IV) as Grand Master of the Freemasons, the first royal prince to hold the position. Used for important ceremonies to this day.

"Friendship punchbowl". Made in China and taken to India where it was used by the "Lodge of True Friendship". When India gained its independence the lodge moved to England, taking the bowl with them.

Corridor between galleries that I just thought looked cool. I did Google and Google confirmed this is art deco (but I'm not a art/architecture person so I don't know). I just thought it looked nice.

The second hall, surrounded by a balcony where chairs like this looked down on viewers.

Apron worn by the future King Edward VIII during his initiation ceremony.

So what's it like to visit?

I found it pretty educational, as far as these museums go. There was a lot of information about the Freemasons. I think the museum was kind of opened up to try to be like "Hey please stop thinking we're all some evil secret society".

I never bought into that but I did think it was one of those things that were like "oh this used to be a guild for actual freemasons (like stone workers) and then rich people started joining and it turned into a Boys Club" but it turned out it was started by rich men wanting to play dress up. So that was interesting.

There was a lot of artefacts, but a lot were like "here's a freemason medal from this place, here's one from this place" and when you've seen one you've seen most of them.

Most of the items had labels next to them, but I noticed some had QR codes instead which was annoying. I don't want to have to be scanning some code to find out what you could have put on a label. But also, they didn't even have free wifi so ???

Accessibility

If you need to sit down often, bring your own chair. There were benches at the sides of the galleries but you can't really sit and take in the exhibits at the same time?

Also I don't know if this would be accessible to people with larger wheelchairs? The museum is on the first floor, and the lift up was quite small. Also the doors were at a right angle to each other. You know how sometimes the doors are on either side of the elevator? This time they were perpendicular which was interesting but I don't know if that might cause problems for people. There may have been a larger, more accessible elevator elsewhere in the building, worth checking ahead to make sure.

Mostly very quiet. Lights were pretty bright, especially in the galleries.

(Didn't go to the bathroom here, cannot comment on what they were like but they did exist)

[crampedfingers]

made it out to the noguchi museum :)

[crampedfingers]

a rainy sunday necessitated a trip to the MET :)