Page 115 - Off The Tourist Trail - 1000 Unexpected Travel Alternatives (Part 2 of 2)

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ABOVE The handsome cream facade of the Sir John Soane’s Museum
LEFT “The Gherkin” – Norman Foster’s 2003 architectural showpiece
Small Museums
London has enough museums – over 300 and
counting – to exhaust even the most ardent
culture-vulture. The city is home to some of the
world’s greatest collections, including the British
Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the
Natural History Museum, to name just three. If the
sheer scale of the major museums (and the density
of the crowds thronging them) seems daunting,
however, then there are plenty of more intimate
establishments to explore, covering smaller slices
of local or cultural history, such as the absorbing
Geffrye Museum, which showcases changing
fashions and lifestyles through a series of period
interiors dating from 1600 to the present day.
Other museums have been dedicated to – or
created by – famous individuals, lending them a
sense of personality, and sometimes a decided
quirkiness, which is generally missing from the
larger public collections. Notable examples include
the Freud Museum, occupying the rambling
Hampstead house where the great Viennese
psychoanalyst spent his final years and which has
been preserved largely as Freud left it, complete
with his book-lined study and original consulting
couch. Or the equally enjoyable, if slightly less
reverent, Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221b Baker
Street, which lovingly recreates the home of the
celebrated fictional detective, and features Holmes’s
violin, magnifying glass, and chemical apparatus.
Then there’s the unique Sir John Soane’s Museum
in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, an elegant old Georgian
townhouse once owned by Sir John Soane, one of
the foremost architects of his era, who filled it with
an extraordinary array of artworks and antiquities
collected from around the world, piled up around
the atmospheric old house in a picturesque jumble.
Practical Information
Freud Museum 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead; tel. +44 20 7435 2002;
www.freud.org.uk
Geffrye Museum Kingsland Road, Shoreditch; tel. +44 20 7739 9893; www.
geffrye-museum.org.uk
Sherlock Holmes Museum 221b Baker Street, Marylebone; tel. +44 20 7935
8866; www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk
Sir John Soane’s Museum 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Holborn;
tel. +44 20 7405 2107; www.soane.org
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