First, I need to report that the train ride from the Bourne End rail station into Paddington is rather painless. If catching a well timed connection in Maidenhead, it puts me at the Paddington station in London in about 45 minutes. Which is nice, the train station in our neighborhood is just half a mile from our house. It was so surprisingly painless, I'm going to head into London more often. I'll have to start putting together lists of places to go radiating out from Paddington. Today I rode in, walked through a part of Kensington Gardens on my way to the British Museum of Natural History (BMNH).
Kensington Gardens is a lovely green space riddled with monuments, it's a space that warrants its own exploration time. However, today I only made a side trip over to the Albert Memorial as I was on a mission to get to the museum. It's a little over a mile and a half from Paddington to the museum, with most of that passing through the gardens, it made for a great walk.
Kensington Gardens Photo Set
The BMNH has free admission (with the exception of a couple of the special exhibits). This is an amazing museum, it's huge, I didn't have time to make it to all the exhibits. Which is alright, as I plan on returning.
For mineral lovers, there are multiple mineralogy display rooms. The first of which is an enormous room with 44 double sided cases, the side walls lined with tall display cases and aisles dotted with even more displays. I spent so much time admiring this collection, the docent approached me, "are you a scientist? Do you want to examine specimens in person?" I was simply taking my time and enjoying the interesting photography subjects:
At the far end of the room was the Aurora Diamond Collection. This is a collection of an array of 296 naturally colored diamonds, collected over a period of 25 years. The exhibit alternated between dazzling white light and UV light which caused some of the diamonds to luminesce in a variety of colors. Wondrous lime greens, pinks and violets. There is a second mineral and precious gem display in the Dynamic Earth portion of the museum, dark rooms with brilliant bright focused lighting displays.
I was a little disappointed by the "Creepy Crawlies" (bugs and other invertebrates) exhibit. For a place that has one of the largest insect collections in the world, there were hardly any specimens on display. In the marine life hall I also sat in on one of the "Nature Live" talks, there is a talk by a museum scientist every day and it is shown live as a webcast. If you watch today's talk, they even answered my question on carbonatite lava color changes.
A few more interesting shots-- the escalator into the multiple floors of "Dynamic Earth" exhibits, the half dozen or so whale skeletons suspended from the ceiling in the large mammal display along side mock ups of whales and large mammals...
Complete BMNH Photo Set A photo set that will grow in the future.