Taking my own Advice – Day Trip London

See I write about these things and then sometimes I just have to go the next day live my own advice.  Having just written on the importance of sometimes being a tourist close to home, of seeing your own local sights and sounds, I then go off and go ahead with it.

Yup, I relieved my own urge to wander by taking train trip into London.  Scratching the adventure itch felt good, and mooching around with the different scenery felt good.  My day started with a trip into the northern reaches of London to a site I’ve never been in before, The British Library.  If memory serves me correctly this big red brick building was a bit controversial in its design.  It does smack a little of a school of architecture that I tend to associate with School and college buildings but I kind of like it.  The smooth walls and the the large sloping rooves all put me in mind of some form of large communist architecture around the open square fronting.  I guess this could be how the controversy came about.

My little jaunt up in this direction was due to the exhibition that was on of mapping examples from the collection.  Being a bit of a map geek I’d been looking forward to this and indeed it was good, although I was a little disappointed by the lack of more recent examples of mapping and the use of mapping to convey information in concise forms.

What really made the exhibition though was the way in which the old mapping uses different visual styles to represent the information in the way they want to, from the old woodcuts showing military layouts and towns to the much less subtle propoganda posters from the early 20th century.  It’s also interesting to see how the view of the world was altered to show different things, reshaping and distorting the world as they needed.  Usually this seems to involve, or at least in a number of case involved, distorting the world into a circular view centered on Jerusalem and being heavily dominated by the coastal regions of the Mediterranean.

Anyways having wandered the exhibition long enough I venture out, catching the tube back south to Covent Garden to run a little bit of an errand.  I’d managed to find that there is a small shop here specialising in imported food and drink from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Canada so I was hunting for some of the drinks I have enjoyed while last in New Zealand.  Specifically several types of beer and of course some L & P.

I was briefly distracted while on my way there for by the discovery of a Tintin shop.  While admiring the prints I started wondering if my lust for adventure was influenced by the works of Herge.  It certainly seems possible that they had an effect, although there have been no exciting treasure hunts or busted drug smugglers yet in my life.

Rounding of my time in London was a trip down even further south to the Natural History Museum.  It seemed a sensible idea at the time to go see the exhibits as they are relevant to the studying I’m undertaking at present, however in hindsight it may have been a mistake as the whole place was absolutely heaving with people.  I guess that’s what you get for going near the place on a school holiday.  Fortunately for me though most people aren’t interested in the galleries of rocks in glass cabinets, labelled respectively under their appropriate categories with little explanations of how they formed.  So I was pretty much able to finish the day admiring the basaltic rocks in peace.