Museum Of London, 1

We made it eventually to the Museum of London and spent most of the touring day there. It is a fine museum, particularly fine in the pre-historic and Roman bits, and provides a continuous and vivid picture of the history of this dynamic city. London is a city of museums, and much of what is at the city museum is on loan from elsewhere. There are riches to spare. And already there is planning for a new and larger city museum. Comparisons inevitably arise with Paris, and its Carnavalet. We saw the Carnavalet in 2014, also with Rachel (https://roadeveron.blogspot.com/2014/06/musee-carnavalet.html), one stop on a very busy day. It also is impressive, though in different ways. It occurs to me the two museums well reflect the two very different cities, the Carnavalet with far more paintings and sculptures and such, and a marvelous setting, itself historic, in the Hotel Carnavalet and the Hotel Peletier, in the Marais. Make of that what you will. Hopefully, we'll visit the Carnavalet again in a month or so.

Not sure what's in the black Camembert...most of the museum is

upstairs in adjacent buildings

Not so long ago, Britain was not an island; it was
part of Europe, the Thames a tributary of the Rhine;
wooly mammoths, rhinoceros, and other big game
roamed the land; here's a mammoth's foot bones

Temperature fluctuations over the past half 500,000 years; ice
ages, big melts, seas rising and falling; today we're in a melt,
and Britain is an island

Tools, stones and bones; humans have arrived

A large hall of pre-historic artifacts and displays

The kind of local construction the Romans found
when they arrived, 1st century BCE

Nice model of the port of Londinium in Roman times, roughly
the first four centuries CE

Helpful model of the Roman garrison

What a more prosperous Romano-Briton's living room might
have looked like

London, about 250 CE; the bridge across the Thames has been
in place for some time, but the city is already in decline

Out the window, bits of the old city wall, the lowest parts of which
are the Roman wall

A few centuries pass, London is nearly abandoned,
but then King Alfred rebuilds the city and calls it
"Lundenburg"

More centuries pass, the Normans are now firmly in control,
London is their capital, and they build the great St. Paul's
gothic church, modeled here; at the time one of the largest
churches in Christendom; destroyed in the Great Fire

Growing prosperity as the Middle Ages become the Renaissance;
here, a Wagon and Tun, 1554; the wagon crawled up and down 
the table, spraying rose water for dinner guests to wash their hands
with...

Model of The Rose, a theater of the Elizabeth Age

A map of the city before the Great Fire, in copper;
of 17 leaves, only three are known 

And they were used by Dutch painters...