SIGHTS IN LONDON - London 2015 - page 144

footsteps of the 16-year-old princess, and imagine her thoughts as she watched the young
Prince Albert stride through the doors below for the first time.
Outside: Garden enthusiasts enjoy popping into the secluded Sunken Garden, 50
yards from the exit. Consider afternoon tea at the nearby Orangery (see here ) , built as a
greenhouse for Queen Anne in 1704. On the south side of the palace are the golden gates
that became famous in 1997 as the backdrop to the sea of flowers left here by Princess
Diana's mourners.

▲▲▲ ▲▲▲ Victoria and Albert Museum

The world's top collection of decorative arts encompasses 2,000 years of art and design
(ceramics, stained glass, fine furniture, clothing, jewelry, carpets, and more), displaying a
surprisingly interesting and diverse assortment of crafts from the West, as well as Asian
and Islamic cultures. There's much to see, including Raphael's tapestry cartoons, five of
Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, the huge Islamic Ardabil Carpet (4,914 knots in every
10 square centimeters), and a cast of Trajan's Column that depicts the emperor's con-
quests—not to mention the catsuit Mick Jagger wore for the Rolling Stones' 1972 world
tour.

Cost and Hours: Free, but £ 3 donation requested, extra for some special exhibits,
daily 10:00-17:45, some galleries open Fri until 22:00, free tours daily, on Cromwell Road
in South Kensington, Tube: South Kensington, from the Tube station a long tunnel leads
directly to museum, tel. [phone], www.vam.ac.uk .
See the Victoria and Albert Museum Tour chapter.

▲▲▲ Natural History Museum

Across the street from the Victoria and Albert, this mammoth museum is housed in a giant
and wonderful Victorian, Neo-Romanesque building. In the main hall, above a big dino-
saur skeleton and under a massive slice of sequoia tree, Charles Darwin sits as if upon a
throne overseeing it all. Built in the 1870s specifically for the huge collection (50 million
specimens), the building has several color-coded “zones” that cover everything from life
(“creepy crawlies,” human biology, “our place in evolution,” and awe-inspiring dinosaurs)
to earth science (meteors, volcanoes, earthquakes, and so on). Pop in, if only for the wild
collection of dinosaurs—including a realistic animatronic T-rex—and to hear English chil-
dren exclaim, “Oh, my goodness!”