V&A East Storehouse
Located in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, this newly opened museum is fairly unique, as it acts as an active storehouse with some objects on rotating display. Inside we saw a 6 meter square ceiling from Torrijos in Spain, an entire Frank Lloyd Wright designed room, and loads of carved trunks and historical objects.
Design Museum
Located in Holland Park, this small museum is quite interesting and free, with lots of exhibits on the role of design and objects from popular culture. We also liked the large special exhibit, “Fables for our Time”, that rotated through three different displays every 30 seconds displaying futuristic folklore scenes using emojis.
National Gallery
One of the most popular London museums, and one of our favorites as well. I had prebooked us free tickets for 2:30pm but we were just waived through when we arrived. We spent two hours wandering the galleries, revisiting old favorites and spotting some new pieces we hadn’t seen before. It was very crowded in the more popular areas but we did find some open spaces here and there. The impressionist rooms were busy, but you could generally find space away from the most famous paintings. It was cool to see two Manet paintings side by side, and they had a whole room of pastels too.
Science Museum
Eric went here while I was having lunch with my aunt on our last day in the city. He completely geeked out over the array of artifacts including old steam engines, the oldest-serving train, Pasteur’s microscope, the original atomic clock, etc.
V&A Museum
Eric spent about an hour looking around the sculpture hall before we met up in the later afternoon. I stocked up on my fave lemongrass and lime soap, then we admired the hydrangea blooms in the sunny courtyard before moving on.
Saatchi Gallery
We saw an advertisement in the subway for a free exhibit, the RHS Botanical Art Show, so we made our way over to the Saatchi for the first time in while. The exhibit was great! It included several different illustrators from around the world who had one top prizes for their botanical illustrations, and each had a unique style and subject.
