The Horniman Museum in summer

Sunday 16 November 2014











Well... after a hiatus of nearly a month - whoops! - I'm back. A few shots from a late-summer trip to the Horniman Museum, my first visit there. My camera was having a serious focusing problem, which was a little difficult for photographing the sea creatures in the aquarium (especially the frogs), but thankfully we had a bit of sunshine out in the grounds in between torrential rain showers, and my camera struggled far less there. The Horniman Museum has a huge variety of exhibits on show, and is an ideal place for a full-day visit, especially with kids. There's the little in-house aquarium, complete with jellyfish tank (always my favourite); the beautifully traditionally laid out Natural History galleries, filled with preserved specimens of all kinds of taxonomies, and the famous Horniman Walrus; the Music Gallery, providing the display of over one thousand instruments; the African Worlds gallery and the Centenary Gallery. Also worth a visit is the changing Balcony Gallery, which currently holds an exhibition of work from contemporary Romanian photographers in London (at the time I visited, it showcased wonderful photographs of traditional life in Arctic Siberia).

Of course, I loved the preserved skeletons and taxidermy, but it was lovely to go to a museum and then be able to go out into the grounds to see flower gardens and animals (including a very cute baby alpaca, with some pretty unimpressed, protective parents). It's also lovely to be able to see a view of the city from all the way out here, where you can see the towers of Central London poking up through the trees. Well worth a visit at any time of year!