After two sunny days the weather didn’t look so good today with a high probability of rain, so we decided to go and do something indoors.

We chose the Natural History Museum mainly because I was interested in the architecture. The building is often called ‘a cathedral of nature’ because of the magnificent main hall and was opened in 1881 to house 80 million items in five main collections: botany, entomology, minerology, palaeontology and zoology. The museum is most famous for its collection of dinosaur skeletons but has many important collections including specimens collected by Charles Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle.

The building is clad in terracotta tiles inside and out, chosen to resist the sooty atmosphere of Victorian London. The tiles have intricate relief sculptures of flora and fauna and their colour gives the building a lovely warm feeling.

There is no hope of trying to absorb all the museum has to offer, even with multiple visits so we decided just to go to the volcanoes and earthquakes, and the evolution exhibits with a coffee break in between as information saturation sets in quite quickly these days. We kept away from the most popular exhibits which were way too crowded and were full of groups of primary and secondary students.

The museum at first seems overwhelming but it is divided into four zones, red, green, blue and orange.  The red zone is themed around the changing history of earth, the beginning of the universe, plate techtonics, volcanoes and earthquakes, human evolution etc. The green zone has fossils, birds, creepy crawlies, the main hall with the blue whale skeleton and section of an 1,335 year old sequoia tree. The blue zone has dinosaurs, fish, marine invertebrates, mammals, and human biology. The orange zone has a wildlife garden and the Darwin Centre – the collection of millions of preserved species. So the signage and colour coding make it pretty easy to get your way around.

So that was our day. It is about a 20 minute walk from our hotel, across Hyde Park to the museum and while there were a few spits every now and then it didn’t really rain. Tomorrow morning we pack our bags and head way out west to Minehead and the beginning of our walking.