My selection of the London venues is below:

Friday

5:30 pm – 9pm	Banknotes and Bullion
	The Bank of England Museum will offer its visitors a rare opportunity for an evening visit as part of the nationwide Museums at Night campaign.
6pm – 9pm	Lancing the Surgeons (Holborn)
	Talks, activities and archival displays will look at the life of Thomas Wakley, surgeon, Lancet founder and editor and medical crusader.
6pm – 9pm	Apsley House (Picadilly)
	Enjoy highlight talks about the fascinating history and collection as you explore the rooms in the atmospheric half light of the evening. (Cost: £8.20)
6pm – 9pm	Love and Lust (Bloomsbury)
	Follow clues related to seduction in the animal world, look at the work of amorous artists and find romance in the ancient world.
7pm – 9pm	Ghostly guides at Valence House
	Let the spirits of Valence House past guide you around this ancient building, as we go on the hunt for their stories with psychic ghost hunter. (Cost: £15)
7pm – 10pm	Maps Unleashed (Covent Garden)
	Explore the London Transport museum after hours with a glass of wine and enjoy the opening evening of this brand new exhibition – Mind the Map. (Cost: £8)
7pm – 9pm	The Body Adorned (Forest Hill)
	Visit our current exhibition The Body Adorned out of hours, along with talks and demonstrations.
7pm – 9pm	Twilight Tour of Osterley Park House
	An exclusive chance to view such rooms as Osterley’s extraordinary Long Gallery and the opulent Tapestry Room (Cost: £10)
7:30 pm – 9:30 pm	When the shutters shut (Richmond-upon-Thames)
	A special after-hours event as part of ‘Museums at Night’, discover what happens when the visitors have gone home. (Cost: £15)
8:15 pm – 9pm	Candle-lit tours of Dr Johnson’s House (Fleet Street)
	A rare opportunity to see many of the rooms in Johnson’s historic house lit by candlelight in these special curator-led twilight tours (Cost: £12)

Saturday

5pm – 8:30 pm	A Night in Space (Greenwich)
	Evening at the Royal Observatory with planetarium shows, workshops and talks.
6pm – 9pm	Apsley House (Picadilly)
	Enjoy highlight talks about the fascinating history and collection as you explore the rooms in the atmospheric half light of the evening. (Cost: £8.20)
6:30 pm – 11:30 pm	Candle-lit tours of a steam pumping station (Brentford)
	Experience the majesty of Kew Bridge Steam Museum’s giant steam pumping engines working away by candle-light. (Cost: £10)
7pm	The Secrets of Southside House (Wimbledon)
	A talk/guided tour in which you can discover the story of the rescue and restoration of this historic family home (Cost: £15)

Viruses and bacteria can send a person to bed in a ball of misery, but it is The Cough that does the real damage.

No level of discomfort compares to the pounding headache that comes from repeatedly coughing all day – and most of the night. The chest pains that build up and the stomach cramps that come from repeated coughing.

Yes, The Cough has returned, just after I picked up some pills to deal with a lingering but quite mild infection deep in the throat.

Every time I pick up an illness, I wait in dread for the illness to pass, for that is when The Cough will reach out and turn discomfort into pain. A few days of pain transforms into a lingering mild cough that is barely noticeable, but takes weeks to vanish entirely.

The Cough started as a recurring phenomena when I was a teenager, and if recovering from a cold, and coughing, my dad would bang on the bedroom door and demand that I stop coughing. As if I were doing it just to annoy the parents.

A couple of decades later and I still haven’t found a way of switching off The Cough at will.

The Cough is back, and making me feel worse than when I was ill.

When I eventually die, I fully expect that my corpse will squeeze out a final cough. Hopefully during the funeral.

The string of little black pods – when seen from a distance – ties the white pylons together and creates the visual link across the river that had been lacking with just the cables themselves, and the constant rotative movement of the pods is slightly hypnotic to watch.

Sadly, for all the elegance that has gone into the pylons, the terminus buildings look rather disappointing. The plastic appearance of the external walls reminds me more of a cheap greenhouse from the 1970s than a modern transport service.

They really are quite a let down considering the vast budget that has been poured into the development.

One improvement on earlier potential plans though is the signage on the cable car pods themselves. The preview model had a big roundel right in the middle of the main window, which would have been most irksome had it been left there in the live version.

Fortunately they have been removed, ensuring unobstructed views – over the shoulders of the people sitting opposite you – or you can twist around to look out behind you.

The terminus building on the north side looks less finished than its southern counterpart, but both look as if they are within a couple of weeks of completion.

The necessary protections are being added to the bottom of the pylon that sits on land – in the form of high fences to stop naughty people climbing the pylons and some landscaping.

Another area that is being prepared for the Cable Cars though is the nearby DLR station at Royal Victoria. The cable car may be officially designed to link two commercial venues – Excel and the Dome – but they presumably expect people to travel to use the service and not the local venues.

A new entrance is being built on the Western platforms and the old DLR sign has been torn down for the new roundels they seem to prefer. The platform signs have already been updated to point to the new shiny thing.

It’s a guess, but I would suspect that the Cable Car will open to the public in little over a month once final testing is signed off and the terminus buildings are finished.

Some more photos here.

This is the conundrum that resonates throughout a display of some of of Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of the human body that has just opened at The Queen’s Gallery.

That the display is even possible is itself a remarkable story.

Leonardo spent a substantial period of his life dissecting animals and for a while, human bodies and drawing up his researches, probably for a Magnum opus that he hoped to publish, but he died before the work could be completed.

Left to an assistant who struggled to make anything of them, they were sold in 1590 to an Italian Sculptor who is thought to be the person who catalogued them and bound them into a series of books. One of these books made its way to the UK, and turned up somehow in the Royal Collection at Windsor by 1690.

There the book sat, largely unnoticed until 1773 when the surgeon William Hunter studied them and urged their publication. He then also died. It wasn’t until around 1900 that the book was reproduced in Folio form and their significance became more widely understood.

The book was broken up in the 1970s, but this was so that each page could be protected from deterioration.

That brings us to 2012, and many of the drawings have gone on public display for the first time.

The gallery has been divided into zones which follow Leonardo’s researches, starting with animals, on to humans, and finally back to animals when he lost his patron shortly before he himself died.

This is a display that can either be looked at as a collection of 500 year old drawings by an accomplished artist, or as scientific records by a now respected anatomist.

His studies of bone structures and muscles were inspired initially as he felt they would assist in his paintings of the human form. He later found this was not really working, but he was by now sufficiently interested in the topic to carry on regardless.

An early decision he took was to abandon the idea of proportionality in the human form when he realised that the arms are rarely an exact percentage length compared to the head etc. His most famous drawing, the Vitruvian Man pre-dates that decision. The original is in the Accademia art gallery in Venice, but they have reproduced it here, because frankly, you just have to.

One mystery is when the drawings were carried out. Methods for preserving organs did not exist at the time, so either he drew rough notes while carrying out bloody dissections and then redrew them later, or drew them entirely from memory. Which it was is not known.

He also made a number of assumptions about the human body – especially females, of which he probably had fewer bodies to study. Most bodies were executed criminals, and hence tended to be male.

For example, he understood in detail how the womb looks in a Cow, so assumed that was the same in a human – leading to a drawing of a human female torso coming complete with cow reproductive organs.

Another drawing of a human baby is accurate, but again, put inside a womb that owes too much to a cow dissection – shown up by the representation of four placenta, which is correct for cows, but not humans.

Then again, if someone calls a woman a cow, maybe they aren’t being nasty and rude, but making allusions to 16th Century science?

Probably not.

My visit included a tour by the curator as part of a press event, so I didn’t try the audio guide, but it is likely to be necessary if you want to enjoy the exhibition as the description cards are fairly small and you’ll miss the history of his research otherwise.

The exhibition is open until October 2012 and entry is £9.25 per adult.

I picked up a copy of the book that accompanies the exhibition and is detailed with lots of high quality reproductions of his original drawings. There is also an iPad app that offers translations of his texts, and if you can read Medieval Italian, it can reverse his famous mirror writing.

I doubt many people who casually wander past the huge archway realise it is open to the public to go and stand almost at the top and get some very fine views of the local area. However, over the past few months it has been closed to the public as English Heritage replaced the large double-height room at the top with a two floor exhibition space.

It reopened this week, with an exhibition about one of English Heritage’s other properties – Stonehenge.

Straight up to the 3rd floor via the lift  and the exhibition space is dominated by a model of Stonehenge, made from something slightly less durable than bluestones… it’s made from cork.

This is — fortunately I think — less an exhibition about Stonehenge itself than about the modern history of the land it sits in and the way it has been depicted in paintings and tourist tat.

A copy of the earliest known drawings of Stonehenge that dates to 1562 is on display and then the history moves along from more technical drawings to the romantic depictions done by Turner et al. The controversy when the land was sealed off with barbed wire in 1902 is looked at, and marked the time when the Stones were no longer freely available to anyone who didn’t mind walking across a muddy field.

Do expect lots of paintings and drawings, and some information about the layout of the stones and where they come from. Do not expect any unfounded speculation about celestial alignments or other religious purposes though. Leave that to the druids.

A couple of glass cases are filled with historic mementos of the site as a tourist attraction, including the very first guidebook to the stones, published in 1823. The area may have been basically, in a turnip field owned by a farmer, but it pulled in enough visitors rich enough to take time off work and travel to justify printing a guide to the place.

Upstairs is more display space, this time devoted to the planned replacement visitor centre, which has been a bone of contention for the past couple of decades, at least – and they probably want to show off the latest version to drum up support for the plans.

It’s up here that you can also go outside onto a walkway just underneath the monumental sculpture and watch the soldiers heading to Buckingham Palace (10:40am) or on the other side, coming back an hour later. If memory serves from my last visit, the walkway has been untouched by the building works inside.

Now that the big room inside has been split into two floors, the display about the history of Wellington Arch has moved down a couple of floors, and the stairs are delightfully vertigo inducing (or you can take the lift).

Quite a lot of space is given to the history of the hugely controversial and widely ridiculed statue of the Duke of Wellington that once stood on top, and the design for its replacement which stands there today – and was quietly unveiled 100 years ago this March. It’s apparently the largest bronze sculpture in Europe.

They also touch on the concept that great cities have Grand Entrances and some of the rejected plans for the arch at Hyde Park Corner, and how it moved from its original location to where it is today due to Victorian traffic congestion.

It was also for a while a police station, with a cat called Snooks.

When I was last here, down in the bottom of the arch as you left the building was a generic English Heritage style gift shop, with lots of tea towels, fudge and cups for sale. That has been swept away and the space is now possibly London’s smallest dedicated bookshop.

However, it’s also quite a good bookshop as it specialises in English Heritage publications, or books about their properties. Could be quite a lure for the history bibliophile, and is a pleasant change from the usual gift-shop fare.

The Stonehenge exhibition is open now until 24th June (Wed-Sun 10am-5pm) and entry is £4, which I would say is quite good for the exhibition and the walkway views combined.

The Quadriga Gallery (named after the roof-top bronzes) will change displays every few months, and later this year will have displays about Blackpool Tower, Kenwood House then Egyptian style architecture in England.

Often nothing more than a wooden raft with a bit of gravel and some plants, they serve their purpose well enough.

Last year though, luxury arrived near Heron’s Quay (map link) when some vast floating reed type beds were installed – although right next to what is about to become a huge building site.

The birds seem to have taken to them quite happily though, and there are four – or maybe, five, nests on the floating beds.

This morning as I was passing by, one of the birds got off its nest to do some tidying up, so it was possible to see that luck not withstanding, there may be four baby of whatever that bird is swimming around the docks shortly.

Collective awwww!

Another bird seemed to have taken its cue from the local skyscrapers, and had built its own tall tower to nest on.

I notice people stopping to feed the birds at times, although it is usually bread, which is actually not that good for them. I was told by a city farm last year that grapes make a suitable substitute.

Also, the restored 1938 era tube train — complete with adverts from the 1980s when it was withdrawn from service — will be offering trips along the Metropolitan Line.

There will be four trips offered, and the price quoted is per adult, and the ticket allows up to 3 children to go free.

Book tickets via the LTM website or you can pick up any unsold seats on the day.

Long term readers will know I am rather keen on these vintage trips, even if only to watch the looks of astonishment from people on the platforms as the “wrong train” pulls in to the station – and then departs without collecting anyone.

Date: Sunday 20 May 2012

Journey 1 (30 minutes) £5 

• 10:40 Harrow-on-the-Hill
• 10:45  Harrow-on-the-Hill (depart)
• 11:02 Rickmansworth
• 11:15 Amersham

Journey 2 (1 hour)  £10

• 11:38  Amersham (depart)
• 11:52  Rickmansworth
• 12:06   Harrow-on-the-Hill (arrive)
• 12:09   Harrow-on-the-Hill (depart)
• 12:24   Rickmansworth
• 12:41   Amersham

Journey 3  (1 hour)  £10

• 13:12 Amersham (depart)
• 13:26 Rickmansworth
• 13:40   Harrow-on-the-Hill (arrive)
• 13:45   Harrow-on-he-Hill (depart)
• 14:02 Rickmansworth
• 14:15 Amersham

Journey 4 (1 hour, 40 minutes) £15

•  14:38  Amersham
• 14:52  Rickmansworth
• 15:06    Harrow-on-the-Hill (arrive)
• 15:15    Harrow-on-the-Hill (depart)
• 15:32  Rickmansworth
• 15:45  Amersham (arrive)
• 15:53  Amersham (depart)
• 16:07  Rickmansworth
• 16:21    Harrow-on-the-Hill

Book tickets via the LTM website.

They usually have the Sarah Siddons electric locomotive there as well, and the LTM website was mentioning that until today, so I presume something is unhappy with the electrics.

It is an annual event, but I presume housing turnover in the Hoxton and Shoreditch media land is fairly rapid as people always seem surprised by it each year. Especially last year!

The event is however open to the public – completely free of charge, and always worth a visit, especially to see inside the historic Armoury House and its new museum. Map link

A series of historic enactments are typically followed by some rather more aggressive displays of modern military firepower – the gunshots and explosions that so worried the locals last year.

Set piece displays will include:

• Guns and horses display by the Kings Troop, RHA
• A display by 17th Century Pikemen & Musketeers of the HAC
• A display by the HAC Band and Corps of Drums
• A display by the Light Cavalry HAC

There will also be a parachute drop into the main grounds – weather permitting. This was the event that went slightly wrong last year as it was too windy, and the test parachutist landed on the road outside, in front of a double-decker bus.

A parachute drop probably also means the Chinook will be in the grounds, and usually that you can have a look inside. There should also a selection of other weapons, and some tanks/armoured vehicles to have a look at climb inside if you ask nicely.

The grounds open at 5:30pm with the main events starting (if I recall correctly) from 6:30pm.

There is a pay bar and free army BBQ.

Officially, this is an event to show off the Territorial Army, but the sales pitch is quite relaxed and it is a very good evening out.

This is a Norman era church, built from stone and flint that would seem to my mind to be in very short supply in the marshy flood plain it sits in, so must have been brought in by boat, making it quite an expensive church to have built at the time.

According the church website, the nave and chancel were built around 1100, with the tower added later that century. The upper part of the tower was constructed towards the end of the 12th century.

A Lady chapel was built comparatively recently – in 1843. A stone tablet in the wall notes that the clock is a smidgen over 100 years old, having been installed in 1911 to commemorate the coronation of King George V.

I tend to judge how active a church is by its graveyard. If the burials stop in the Victorian era, then this is a church that is dying, whereas recent burials suggest a thriving local community. This church is slightly unusual in that the obvious graveyard is now managed by the council and is very Victorian, but there is a separate plot of land hidden by a hedge that has being lain out with modern, rather bland in my opinion graves.

Victorian era ostentatious graves being less favoured these days. Sadly.

Although most of the building is charmingly built of stone, there is a rather ugly looking extension around the back, which I presumed to be the aforementioned Lady Chapel.

Sadly wasn’t really able to go inside and take photos as the church was in use when I visited. Yes, some village churches do still serve a purpose.

The usual village war memorial dominates the side entrance, although I was rather more taken with the more modest war memorial graves, which I think are deeply moving on a personal basis in the way that community memorials lack.

The large stained-glass window behind the Altar; representing Christ’s ascension into Heaven, was installed in 1958 as a memorial to Amy Benewith.

Although I couldn’t get to see it from the inside, I did manage to photograph it from the outside, with one of the interior lights lining up to create a nice effect.

A more detailed history of the Church and its architecture, including some internal photos can be found on the Friends website.

Rather improbably, sitting in the middle of this sealed off island are two villages, and a heritage museum.

Museums that can be visited are enjoyable, but one that is in the middle of an MoD firing range sounds more enjoyable – if only for the novelty of its location.

As a non-car driver, the easiest route for this Londoner was a train to Shoeburyness and then a walk to the island, and once through security, up to the village and museum. Access to the village is usually by invitation only, but on the first Sunday of the month during the summer, the museum is open for a few hours, and the general public are allowed in to have a look.

Shoeburyness is a town of limited facilities, so I caught an earlier than intended train so that I could theoretically get back at a more sensible hour – a decision which was to prove a very bad one indeed.

There is a twice-hourly bus that gets you 2/3rds of the way to the checkpoint, but it leaves 5 minutes before the twice-hourly train arrives. Someone at the railway and the bus firms really need to sort that out.

It is 3 miles from the train station to the security checkpoint and then a further 5 miles to the village.

Although the area is largely made up of 1960s housing, it’s not an unpleasant walk along semi-rural streets with occasionally vanishing pavements. A rather cute looking set of very well maintained cottages hinted at their ownership when the bus stop opposite said “MOD houses”

One of the junctions to be turned at was notable for having an ancient church. It was pouring with rain as I approached, but I was able to take a closer look later on the way back.

Eventually though – the end of the public road approached, and the security checkpoint that would let me pass through for another 5 miles to get to the museum. And five miles to get back.

According to the website, the museum opens from noon to 4pm, so arriving at the border by 11am seemed sensible to leave time to walk to the museum roughly 15-30 minutes after it opened.

Sadly, this is where well crafted plans fell to pieces.

Popping into reception to request a pass to inside, I was greeted by a rather surly chap who seemed lacking the usual requisites for a receptionist and when I explained my desires bluntly told me that they wouldn’t let anyone in until noon. Yes, I explained, that’s when the museum opened, but it seemed that I was not allowed onto the Island until then either.

Then he questioned my mode of transport – and pointed out that if I walked, the museum would be closed by the time I arrived. Yes, it does close at 4pm, but he seemed adamant that a 5 mile walk would take at least 4 hours to complete.

It seems a worrying sign if today’s military (or more likely, their auxiliary support services) are walking along tarmac roads at a rate of just 1 mile per hour. Even my protestation that I can walk five miles in little over an hour was met with disdain.

A five mile walk to the village, a look around, a rest and then 5 miles back is NOT that onerous for the average person to complete.

Then he spied my camera bag and started berating me for wanting to be able to take photos, and for the photo I had already taken, from a public road of the entrance – an image that is on Google Street View anyway.

By now it was fairly clear that I could hang around the car park — in the rain — for an hour to be let in, but even if I did, from his demeanour, I had a very strong suspicion that I would be denied entry anyway.

–

It’s not so much the content of what he said, but the way he said it.

A cheerful greeting as I walked in followed by an apology that I couldn’t go past for another hour, but I was welcome to wait inside somewhere if I wanted would have been so much better way to start a conversation.

Follow that with a discussion that I while am free to take photos at the museum, I must not do so on the road to the village would have delivered that disappointing, but perfectly acceptable message in a way that was much better than his attitude that I must be the stupidest person alive to think I could take photos of empty fields within MoD property.

–

I shall be dropping a note to Qinetiq who manage the site that they should amend their website to warn that the 12 O’Clock opening times do not apply to the museum, but the Island – and that walking there is probably forbidden.

The irritating fact is had I caught the later train, I would have arrived closer to noon, and might have been tempted to loiter around for 15 minutes to try the receptionist’s patience again. Oh well.

I wanted to visit a museum that was difficult to visit. I had no idea that it would prove impossible, and mainly due to a surly receptionist.