Visiting a very busy Natural History Museum on Cromwell Road

We were planning to take the bus to Oxford today, but I had a restless night. And one of the challenges of living in a studio apartment is that there is not another room to go to so that your partner can sleep while you turn on the lights to use the computer or read.

Instead of Oxford, today we went past Kensington Palace and to the Natural History Museum.

Kensington Palace began life as a Jacobean dwelling constructed about 1605. It has a very checked past.  Sometimes it was a comfortable home and others it fell into ruin.  

Queen Victoria actually lived there as a young girl and when at the end of her life it was scheduled to be demolished, she intervened. She did not her old home destroyed. The palace was restored and on Queen Victoria's 80th birthday, 24 May 1899 it was opened to the public.

One of the stipulations that the government made at the time of Victoria's rescue of the palace was that there would be rooms open to the public.  Still today you can buy a ticket and visit parts of the palace and see dresses worn by royal women centuries ago as well as those worn by Princess Diana. The best-known resident in recent years was Diana, Princess of Wales (1961-97) who occupied apartments in the north-west part of the palace 

from 1981 to 1997.

Since 2013 the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have made Kensington Palace their home.

The White Rose garden at Kensington is one of the gems in the palace grounds.

The water for the fountains is provided by a bore hole which also feeds water into the 

artificial lake and river created for the gardens.

Flowers similar to these grew in my Grandmother Toole's garden.

A younger slimmer Victoria than other sculptures in the area.

Natural History Museum on Cromwell Road.

Fossil of dinosaur bones

An unusual woman for her times, Mary Anning was a pioneer in the study of fossils.

She was born in 1799 and lived on the southern shores of England which is rich in Jurrasic fossils.

She was the first to recognize several different species. 

Coming up an escalator from the center of the earth.

This oversized tarantula is mechanical and moves.  Let's be grateful that we won't

encounter any tarantulas this size. 

Very busy day for lots of school children. 

Lunch at the Bosphorus

Donner Kebab

Not a lot of seating. This is along a narrow hallway at the bag of the eatery.