Day 6: Ken can't but Barbican

This morning we caught the train to Barbican to visit the Museum of London which had some fabulous displays and artifacts of life in London from pre-history to the present.  Bisecting the museum are two big slabs of the London wall.  

In this pic on the left the actual Roman bit is the foundation stuff at the bottom.  The wall was extensively reinforced between the 1300s and 1700s and then fell into disrepair, eventually being either partly demolished or incorporated into later buildings.  Gradually it faded from public memory and the surviving parts were  only 'resurrected' when they were exposed following bombing raids during World War 2.  The original wall was three kilometres long and there's another big chunk near the Tower of London.   In case anyone is worried that I will soon start giving steeple measurements and distances between stations on the Circle Line, I'll move on now after sharing this further pic of the Wall.  Again, the Roman bit is towards the bottom - the upper bit is medieval.:

After our Barbican adventures, we headed back to the British Museum to see the Ice Age art exhibition.  It featured lots of fertility figures and bison etc etched onto mammoth bone. Some of the work was exquisite and other pieces were quite stylised and almost modern in concept - it seemed extraordinary that these works were up to 30,000 years old. After the Ice Age exhibition we had a gander at Lindow Man - a 1st century Briton found in a peat bog in Manchester.  He looked a bit the worse for wear given he was bashed and garrotted before death. After Lindow man we saw the Sutton Hoo hoard -7th century Saxon treasures found inside an old boat buried in an East Anglian field.

After all this ancient history, it was time for a cleansing ale and our Lonely Planet guide book recommended the nearby Queens Larder pub for a thirst-quenching brew. This pub was described in our guidebook as "tiny but wonderfully cosy" and is called the Queens's Larder because George the Third's long-suffering wife, Queen Charlotte kept special medicinal foods in the pub's cellar when George was being treated nearby during his mad phases.  Alas, the pub's ambience was somewhat diminished by fluoro-vested workmen wielding concrete saws just outside the door. 

Ah well. 

 On the way back to our cubby, we paid homage to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin who in 1908 resided just around the corner, and Mahatma Gandhi, who has a dedicated memorial in Tavistock Square, next to our digs. Currently it sports a banana and a couple of mandarins, which we assume are respectful offerings and not just a short cut to a rubbish bin.

 

Lenin's 1908 crash pad.

Gandhi memorial next door to our digs.

 

 

I hope our blog readers aren't whispering among themselves about my crappy spacing and poor picture placement in this post. I blame David Cameron and his mongrel Conservative Party. Bring on the revolution!