Travel Reference
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is now home to the Garden Museum which puts on excellent exhibitions on a
horticultural theme in the ground-floor galleries, and has a small permanent exhibition
in the “belvedere”, reached by a new wooden staircase. There's a section on the two John
Tradescants (father and son), gardeners to James I and Charles I, who are both buried in
the churchyard. You can even view one of the Tradescants' curiosities - a “vegetable lamb”
that's in fact a Russian fern - plus a few dibbers and grubbers, and some pony boots
designed to prevent damage to your lawn.
You can visit the church's shop and café for free - what's more you can take your tea
and cake out into the small graveyard, now laid out as a seventeenth-century knot
garden , where two interesting sarcophagi lurk among the foliage. The first, topped by
an ornamental breadfruit, is the resting place of Captain Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty
fame. More intriguing is the Tradescant memorial which features several very unusual
reliefs: a seven-headed gri n contemplating a skull and a crocodile sifting through
sundry ruins flanked by gnarled trees. The Tradescants were tireless travellers in their
search for new plant species, and John the Elder set up a museum of curiosities known
as “Tradescant's Ark” in Lambeth in 1629. Among the many exhibits were the “hand of
a mermaid…a natural dragon, above two inches long…blood that rained on the Isle of
Wight…and the Passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone”. The less
fantastical pieces formed the nucleus of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum.
15
Imperial War Museum
Lambeth Rd • Daily 10am-6pm • Free • T 020 7416 5000, W london.iwm.org.uk • ! Lambeth North or Elephant & Castle
From 1815 until 1930, the domed building at the east end of Lambeth Road was the
infamous lunatic asylum of Bethlem Royal Hospital, better known as Bedlam . (Charlie
Chaplin's mother was among those confined here - the future comedian was born and
spent a troubled childhood in nearby Kennington.) When the hospital was moved to
Beckenham in southeast London, the wings of the 700ft-long facade were demolished,
leaving just the central section, now home to the Imperial War Museum , by far the
capital's best military museum. The IWM has recently been refurbishing its permanent
galleries, while continuing to stage superb long-term temporary exhibitions - its busy
schedule of talks and films are well worth checking out.
The main galleries
The treatment of the subject is impressively wide-ranging and fairly sober, once
you've passed through the Large Exhibits Gallery , with its militaristic display of guns,
tanks, fighter planes and a giant V-2 rocket. The galleries on the lower ground floor
have been expensively refurbished, and catalogue the human damage of the last
century of conflict, in particular the two World Wars. On the first floor, you'll find
the permanent Secret War gallery, which follows the clandestine activities of MI5,
MI6 and the SOE (the wartime equivalent of MI6) - expect exploding pencils, trip
wires and spy cameras - though its finale is marred by an unrealistically glowing
account of recent SAS operations in the Gulf.
The art galleries and Extraordinary Heroes
he museum's art galleries , on the second floor, put on superb exhibitions taken from
their vast collection of works by war artists, of cial and uno cial, including the likes
of David Bomberg, Wyndham Lewis, Stanley Spencer and John Nash. One painting
that's on permanent display in its own room, alongside three other similarly grand
canvases, is Gassed , by John Singer Sargent, a painter better known for his portraits of
society beauties.
Crimes Against Humanity , also on the second floor, features a harrowing half-hour
film on genocide and ethnic violence in the last century. You can also pay a visit to the
nearby Explore History Centre and peruse the museum's reference books, archive film
clips and its online collection. On the top floor, the Extraordinary Heroes exhibition
 
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