For medical reasons, I am required to visit a hospital for prodding and poking every few months, and the clinic I visit was recently moved from Barts in the City to the Royal London Hospital in the distinctly non-regal Whitechapel.

However, on almost every visit I keep meaning to stick my nose in the museum the hospital is reputed to have, but being distracted by medical matters I keep forgetting. It was therefore slightly bizarre to make a specific trip to the hospital yesterday, not to see a doctor, but to see this fabled museum.

Going in through the main entrance, there is a big directions sign pointing out where everything is – but no sign of a museum. Fortunately, the reception could guide me down the corridor, over the courtyard, across the road and it is in the church outside. The church that incidentally I had walked past on my way to the hospital.

In the courtyard, there is a statue of Queen Alexandra and thinking it looked rather impressive I decided to take a photo of it in the empty courtyard. Opps! Out darted a matronly looking nurse berating me for taking a photo without a permit from the press office.

I might take photos of patients she explained, as I looked around the empty courtyard for the patients of whom the privacy I was so wantonly invading.

Now, I perfectly understand a restriction on deliberately taking photos of patients, but in a hospital where I can guarantee that hundreds of camera phone photos are taken every single day by doting relatives visiting patients, to huff and puff about someone taking a photo of an empty courtyard is rather irritating.

As instructed, an email has been sent to the press office for permission to take a photo.

In the meantime, have a look at some photos of the statue that other people took.

Pettifogging over – I continued to the museum, which is round the back of the church and not at all accessed through the large doorway indicating the library and archives. Nope, its the next smaller doorway along.

Down the slope and opening the solid looking wooden door and an electric bing-bong heralds the arrival of another visitor into the museum.

Considering the lack of signage in the hospital about the museum I wasn’t expecting that much to be honest, but was pleasantly surprised at the size of the place. Roughly horseshoe shaped, the museum is lined with large glass cases packed full of mementos from the hospital’s long history, which can be dated back as far as 1740.

Past the original royal charter and the small group watching the now ubiquitous video screen explaining the history of the museum for those less inclined to read the display boards and I was into the museum proper.

Here is the sort of museum I love, lots of glass cases full of things to look at, each with a letter code and a key explaining what they are. Some of the cases are generic medical history and a few are devoted to specific people who are famously linked to the hospital.

Whether you are interested in the story of the nurse, Edith Cavell, the Elephant Man or Jack the Ripper, there is ample here to sate your curiosity.

Of considerable interest to me are the three representations of the Whitchapel Mount, which was a huge mound of earth that can possibly be linked to Saxon times, and was almost certainly part of the English Civil War defences of the city. I had see one of the drawings before, but the other two were new to me.

The museum is free to enter apart from the donations tin by the door. I was probably in there for about half an hour, although the more diligent visitor can easily spend an hour or more if they want. I will probably dip in every few months on my regular visits to the hospital to look at things in more detail.

The Museum is sadly not open at weekends though – being just Tuesday to Friday, 10am-4.30pm, but is certainly worth a visit if you have a day off work.

Unsurprisingly, the Diamond Geezer has been there already.

Like most industries, the web design industry is affected by fashions and trends. As soon as one website tries something and coincidentally happens to be successful, people instantly presume the design was the key factor and update their websites accordingly.

Google introduced the minimalist website at a time when most websites were cluttered and suddenly everyone wanted to pull in the Digital Feng Shui experts and de-clutter their websites.

Blogs looked like the future once, and big corporate websites not only needed blogs written in a casual way by the Managing Director Press Office, but this expanded to making the whole website look like a blog, and in some cases putting out key financial information in in blog postings rather than in the investors or financial news section.

Now there is a new trend – the analogue clock.

I am not sure where it started, but the first version of it I saw was on the relaunched UK Parliament website, which apart from being full of bugs had suddenly acquired an animated clock at the top of the page. Despite being fairly universally disliked in the comments section, the website designer was adamant that it would remain.

Recently,  the BBC website received one of its periodic evolutions and gained a clock at the top of the page. Semi-tolerable in that it is in the style of the BBC clock from about two-decades ago, so old people will like it, but I still wonder what functionality it adds to the website.

Recently I noted that the Chinese website, Xinhua had gained a clock – although it looks suspiciously like the BBC clock and even had the same animated seconds hand. The file name is different though, so they have at least tried to cover their tracks if plagiarism has occurred.

This morning, my attention was drawn to a website promoting a course about tea tasting (nice idea, ouch price tag) and it has a clock on the top of the website. Are people timing their tea making process by website clocks I wondered?

These are just the websites I could recall this morning – I’ve seen clocks sprouting up all over the place over the past couple of months.

The clocks are taking over!

As quite a fan of both the art and the science of Horology, and at one time had about a dozen different clocks in my living room, I love clocks – but not on websites.

If I want to see clocks, I’ll go here. I don’t need to be reminded of the time every time I visit a website though.

Please, let the fashion for putting analogue clocks on the tops of websites be a short-lived one.

Update:

It’s been drawn to my attention that the beta version of the new BBC website has dropped the clock. It seems the era of website clocks may indeed be a short-lived one. Hurruh!

Twitter, a place where people chat about their latest cup of coffee (guilty!) or hang on the latest comment from tabloid celeb X (not guilty!), also has a more worthy side to it. Quite a few museums have leapt onto the Twitter bandwagon and use it as a good way of communicating either news about what they are up to, or just random chatter that is relevant to their topic.

For example, the Natural History Museum has a “species of the day” series going on at the moment, along with general natural history chatter – or there is the Imperial War Museum who regularly mention “this day in history” type events from previous wars.

A group have therefore declared that today (1st Feb) is Follow a Museum Day, and Twitter users are exhorted to click the necessary and keep informed with what museums are up to.

I naturally follow about every museum in London I can find, mainly for the purposes of maintaining the events list, but also as some of them are genuinely quite interesting.

For your convenience, you can follow all of the London museums with a single click by subscribing to a list I maintain – @IanVisits/London-Museums.

Alternatively, the full list I follow is below – there is also a list over at the Follow a Museum Day website.

London Museums on Twitter
	BarbicanCentre Barbican Centre | London
	BFHouse Ben Franklin House | 36 Craven St London
	bletchleypark Kelsey Griffin | Bletchley, UK
	britishlibrary The British Library | London NW1 2DB
	britishmuseum British Museum | London
	Burghhouse1704 Burgh House
	DesignMuseum Design Museum | London
	DickensMuseum Dickens Museum | 48 Doughty Street, London
	DulwichGallery Dulwich Gallery | Gallery Road, Dulwich, London
	ExploreWellcome Wellcome Collection | London, UK
	GEFFRYE London
	HornimanMuseum Horniman Museum | Forest Hill, London SE23
	ICALondon The ICA | The Mall, London
	I_W_M Imperial War Museum | London, Duxford, Manchester
	ldnfilmmuseum London Film Museum | County Hall, London
	ltmuseum L T Museum | London
	MuseumChildhood Museum of Childhood | Bethnal Green, London
	MuseumofLondon Museum of London | London, UK
	Musevery Museum of Everything | London
	NHM_London NaturalHistoryMuseum | South Kensington, London
	postalheritage BPMA | London, Essex and Shropshire
	RaggedSchool Ragged School Museum | London E3
	RAFMUSEUM RAF Museum | North London + Shropshire
	sciencemuseum Science Museum | Exhibition Road, London
	SomersetHouse Somerset House
	Tate London, Liverpool and St Ives
	UCLMuseums Central London
	V_and_A V&A | London
	WallaceMuseum Wallace Collection | Central London

A few weeks ago, I had an email from the Met Police’s mailing list letting me know they had opened up a new heritage centre, which sounded quite interesting.

Alas, only open Mon-Fri, and closing at 4pm meant it has taken a few weeks before I could get along to have a look.

It is not the infamous “black museum” that is housed within Scotland Yard and is not open to the public, ever – although a recent opportunity for a visit due to a charity auction for the police’s benevolent fund got my heart beating, until the auction was suddenly cancelled.

Damn.

That disappointment aside, the press blurb looked interesting enough for me to wander along. Informed that the museum is “opposite West Brompton tube station”, I was a bit wary as I know that opposite the station is the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre. Surely they haven’t taken over that building?

Nope, and the museum is not by any stretch of the imagination “opposite” the station – more like about 200 yards to the left of the station (map link).

Having found the modern looking building, it is not a bad little museum. It was laid out the way I like museums to be done – with glass cases and exhibits on shelves – and a notable lack of garish plastic or “interactive stuff”. A video playing clips designed to encourage you to join the Special Constables is a bit annoying, but not too bad.

A genial chap popped his head round a corner to ask if I wanted any help, and was happy to leave me to browse around alone.

However, it is tiny! I doubt I was in there for more than 15 minutes all told.

Worth a detour if you are in the Earl’s Court area – but not really not worth a dedicated trip to the area for a visit.

There is a leaflet on the table by the visitor signing book for a Friends Association for the archive, and they do say one of their aims one day is to open a dedicated museum. May that day swiftly arrive.

The Victoria & Albert Museum have just sent out their May highlights email which headlines with:

Celebrate Baroque and win a trip to Mexico

I suspect the number of entries to be low, and hence my chance of winning to be high.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/baroque/competition.html

On a more serious note, while I appreciate it can be difficult for large organisations to change marketing emails at the very last minute, you’d have thought they would have pulled that message as this week is not really ideal for promoting Mexico as a tourist destination.