Museum Queues

Started: 2023-04-12 19:01:49

Submitted: 2023-04-12 21:08:52

Visibility: World-readable

Visiting Leicester Square, the London Transport Museum, the British Museum, and riding the brand-new Elizabeth Line

I cautiously set my alarm for 09:00 British Summer Time in the hopes of getting enough sleep to manage jet lag. (I steadfastly refused to do the time zone conversion, subtracting eight hours from my new local time to calculate the early morning hour where I'd come from.) I slept ok in my first night in my new time zone (not great, not terrible), awaking ready to explore. (More ready, in fact, than the rest of my family.)

While I waited for the rest of my family to wake up, I went out in search of coffee and pastries for breakfast. Old Brompton Road, leading from our flat to the South Kensington tube station, was full of shops selling pastries, leading to a bit of choice anxiety until I found Ole & Steen, a Danish bakery with an impressive selection of baked goods. I picked up a selection of Danishes, and when I warmed them up in the oven in the tiny kitchen in the flat they were the best pastries I'd even eaten: crisp and flaky dough surrounding a sweet creamy center. I'd found the best shop on Old Brompton Road and never needed to try anything else.

One of the things that emerged during the recent pandemic that has stuck around was the emergence of advanced reservations for timed entry tickets. I'm sure this is great for the museums and attractions, because it helps them to spread out demand over their open hours, but it's a hassle for me as a visitor because if I'm planning on doing more than one thing in a day it's hard to know precisely how much time I'm going to want to spend at any particular place, so I run the risk of either over-scheduling (and having to rush through one place to reach the timed entry ticket for the next one) or under-scheduling (and having extra time that I wasn't sure what to do with). It wasn't always obvious in advance how a venue would handle timed entry tickets versus walk-up visitors; did I need a timed ticket or could I just show up?

I wasn't sure how much we'd be up for on our first full day in London, so I didn't have much of a plan in advance. (For the rest of the trip, I already had an outline with a couple of things to do each day, some with advanced tickets already reserved.) I got timed ticket reservations for the London Transport Museum and the British Museum, plus a reservation for supper, and I hoped I could fill in the rest.

We took the tube from South Kensington to Piccadilly Circus, where I adopted the posture of tour guide and pointed out the most obvious features of the square (the statue of Eros, and the large video display), then headed east towards Leicester Square. As we entered the square we encountered a procession of several hundred people carrying scraggly palm branches for Palm Sunday. Once they passed we walked to the center of the square where several benches were populated with statues, including Mister Bean and Paddington Bear.

Paddington Bear appeared to be eating a marmalade sandwich, but he was not obviously making a mess in the process.

We stopped for an early lunch at a French bakery near Covent Garden. Our next stop was the London Transport Museum, where I had booked a timed ticket for the first available slot, at noon. (This museum had a long queue outside for walk-up visitors, and a much shorter queue for timed tickets.) We headed up to the first floor (which was, I had to remind myself, the first floor above the ground floor) and looked at a selection of early Underground carriages, including one from the Metropolitan line, showing the Inner Circle Railway on its map in the car. This one was built with individual compartments with doors opening onto the platform, very different from the walk-through carriages I'm used to today.

At this point I realized that we had missed our first stop on the second floor, so we headed up one more flight of stairs to look at the displays presenting the early history of transportation in London: an early horse-drawn omnibus, a horse-drawn tram, the River Thames (London's original superhighway), and the railroad terminals that sprang up on the outskirts of London that still needed to be connected to population and employment centers in the city.

The museum featured a bunch of old tube cars, most of which we could walk through and sit in. All of them were carefully labeled with their historical context, but most of which I forgot to record as I was following my children around, so I can't tell you precisely which old tube cars are pictured here.

There was an exhibit on deep-level tunneling and an exhibit about the tube during the Second World War including a short film about sheltering from air raids in the tube tunnels. Calvin drove a tube simulator with a computer screen set up behind an original driving cab. There was an interesting exhibit on the other side of the gallery about hidden and closed spaces in the tube network, including a bat census in a recently-closed tunnel.

The museum was fascinating, but it was also crowded by families with young children and strollers, possibly because the museum offers free admission to children (and also because children love trains and buses, an obsession many people grow out of as they grow up).

We left the museum via the gift shop, and I avoided buying anything, though I was almost tempted by the pillows in the colors of the fabric on different tube lines (except for the fact that I don't really like pillows).

We left the museum with extra time to get to our next scheduled attraction, the British Museum, before the timed entry ticket at 15:30. We sat around the corner in Bloomsbury Square Garden until I figured we could go to the museum; and then when we got there both the timed ticket queue and the walk-in queue were basically empty, and no one even asked to look at my timed entry ticket so we could have walked in early.

Inside the museum was packed with people looking at the priceless artifacts plundered from around the world by the British Empire at the height of its colonial power. Julian went around the museum looking for things mentioned in a kids' treasure-hunt book, which got him somewhat engaged in the museum, at a speed he could probably appreciate.

Calvin and I grazed parts of the rest of the museum, looking at the mummies and other human remains, then spending most of our remaining time in a modest gallery packed with coins and other monetary artifacts from thousands of years of human history. We walked into the adjacent gallery dedicated to clocks a few minutes before the museum staff started closing galleries, fifteen minutes before the official closing time of 17:00.

We had more time to kill before our dinner booking, so we sat on a bench outside Bedford Square Garden (which showed up on my map as an obvious green space, except it was locked and reserved only for the use of the adjacent houses. After a few minutes' rest we carried on and walked to Mildreds Covent Garden, where I had a dinner reservation for 17:45. I at least enjoyed the quirky vegan food from a restaurant I've visited before in London (though not this particular location).

After eating I plotted a roundabout route back to our flat to take in London's newest transit line. We walked around the corner to the Leicester Square station, rode the Northern Line (Charing Cross branch) one stop north to Tottenham Court Road, and transferred to the Elizabeth Line.

Compared to the rest of the Underground, especially the deep-level tube lines with tiny trains and tiny platforms, the brand-new Elizabeth Line was massive. The full-sized trains running in the tunnels were big and spacious and had plenty of seats. Even the details of how the ceiling tiles fit the curves of the ceiling and the corners of the groin vaults showed attention to detail. Crossrail was late and over budget but in the end London got an amazing new transit line so I, at least, think it was worth it.

I was excited to finally have the chance to ride London's newest rail line, even if I had to conjure up a roundabout route back to the flat in order to make the route work.

We disembarked at Paddington, in a deep-level station with an open shaft going all the way up to the street, and transferred to the Circle Line to head the rest of the way to our flat in South Kensington.

We got out at Gloucester Road, on the theory that our flat is half-way between the two adjacent stations on the sub-surface lines, mostly so I could see the current state of platform 3. The first time I saw platform 3 was in 2006 when it featured the art installation City Glow, Mountain Whisper; the next time I saw the station was in 2019 when it featured My name is Lettie Eggsyrub. This time the platform was bare; the next art installation is scheduled to be installed later this year. The only thing I saw on the empty platform was some disassembled scaffolding.

We returned to the flat to retire for the night after our first full day in London.

I took even more pictures than I could fit above; the rest are at Photos on 2023-04-02.