Christmas in South Kensington

By Pete Scully in London, UK

Christmas is over. January is sad. Is it too early to start putting Christmas decorations up for next Christmas? It is? I’d better take them down. I was in London over this past Christmas, visiting family, seeing friends, and going to some of the places that are close to my heart, such as the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I loved coming here as a kid, and that excitement hasn’t dampened even as an adult. For one thing, it is an incredible building – opened in 1881, under the leadership of Dr. Richard Owen, the famed scientist who actually coined the word ‘dinosaur’. I was a dinosaur nut when I was a kid, and my older sister used to take me here so I could count vertebrae and get into the habit of mispronouncing those long dino-names (for years I called them ‘velo-kee-raptors’). Dippy the Diplodocus is still taking pride of place in the main hall, but will soon be replaced with a whale skeleton (the beloved Dippy will go on tour around Britain). This place is more than just dinosaurs of course, and within its walls
it keeps a massive collection of specimens from all periods of natural
history – around 80 million specimens in all, mostly housed in the
Darwin Centre. This is an unbelievably important place. My cousin Dawn Painter actually spends a lot of time drawing the microscopic insects here. My son isn’t as into dinosaurs as I was, but he rerally loves geology, and was fascinated by the rocks and minerals. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that this is the one place I truly miss about London. South Kensington itself is a nice area, very upmarket for sure, but the centre of London’s Museum District. At Christmas-time, an ice rink opens in front of the Natural History Museum, and once we were done looking at bones and rocks, we had a mince pie and some warm soup and I took the chance to sketch. It was a very mild day in London, a perfect day to be out and about.