Day 19 London 5 May 2018

In glorious May sunshine we visited Kensington Palace. The palace was the seat of the monarch before Queen Victoria ascended the throne. King George III acquired Buckingham House in 1769 if Wikipedia is to be believed but it wasn’t yet a palace. The tour showed us the King’s and Queen’s apartments.

Victoria who was born and grew up in Kensington Palace but moved into Buckingham Palace on becoming Queen. It was quite interesting but the highlight was an exhibition on the dresses of Lady Diana. It was an excellent exhibition, despite some of the signature dresses not there, but certainly the in which she danced with John Travolta was there.  Even some of the preliminary art sketches of the dresses. What I found quite moving was, that a young teenage William suggesting that his mother sell her dresses for charity. Which she did and promptly raised 3.4 million pounds. She absolutely glowed in the photographs, beautiful and charismatic. We stopped for a Devonshire tea and scone.

Next stop was the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. A massive monument to Victoria’s late husband. A large ungulate (look up the word, don’t expect any spoon-feeding from me) was featured on each of the four corners of the monument. Take your time…the blog isn’t going anywhere.

In this case it was a camel, elephant, bull and of all things a bison, probably featuring all the animals of the empire. No doubt after you have done your research you realise my deliberate error of identifying the four of them as ungulates. Did you pick the odd one out?

Yes of course, the elephant is not an ungulate.

We did a tour of the Royal Albert Hall with our bubbly, enthusiastic tour guide Milly. We sat beside the Royal Box and watched a rehearsal for a gospel show that night. Apparently the sound had a 6 second echo which they were only able to fix in recent years. The sound was very good and it is obvious that performing at this venue would be on any performer’s bucket list.

Next stop was the Guards Museum which was interesting, but like the Albert Hall we couldn’t take photographs. It was interesting and we did pick up a couple of spelling mistooks.

After a short walk to the Horse Guards Museum we also checked out the changing of the guard

Because of planned maintenance works the underground line we usually take was closed. This announcement seemed somewhat ironic.

“This is a customer service announcement. There is no service on the Circle Line.”

It was a big day.