We’ve have a friend staying from Vienna this week so we wanted to take him out to go see London today. Most of London is pretty old so it seemed like it would be easy to combine the two. My initial thoughts were we could go to either the Natural History Museum and look at dinosaurs (between 252 - 66 million years old) or to the Greenwich Observatory as I know they have a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite you can touch!
“Our meteorite is a large hunk of mostly iron with just under 10% of nickel. It was formed around the same time as our Sun and the Earth and after a leisurely tour of the Solar System as the centre of an asteroid, it came crashing down into southern Africa as the Gibeon Meteorite.
The Nama people used smaller bits of the meteorite for tools and countless chunks remained scattered over a large area. In 1836 Englishman J. E. Alexander collected samples and sent them to London. John Herschel confirmed they were indeed not of this planet.
We’ve sliced away one side of the meteorite so that you can see what it looks like inside and it has this beautiful pattern of metal crystals inside - those crystals only form if the metal has cooled over millions of years, just a few degrees every million years.”
Both seemed like good options but Seb had been to the Natural History Museum before and going to Greenwich was a bit out of the way from other things we wanted to see. In the end we settled on walking along the South Bank but we would then cross over to North Bank at Waterloo so we could do the stretch between Cleopatra's Needle and the Tower of London. Both certifiably old things.
We went to Cleopatra’s needle, 3,500 years old, and I got this photo with it:
It was brought from Alexandria to the UK in 1878 and had a pretty horrendous journey across which included 6 men dying, the history of which is briefly mentioned on the four plaques.
A bit hard to see in the dark but they get the gist across of how it got here.
It’s also flagged by a couple of big sphinx statues. Quite the contrast to the London Eye behind!
We then walked east along the bank until we hit the Tower of London, 953 years old, one of my favourite places in London. So many momentous events have happened there and it’s intrinsically tied into the fabric of British history. Despite all the madness that has happened there over its history and the general scrum it becomes with tourists during the day now it was really peaceful at night and the daffodils were blooming in the moat. Really beautiful.
Old stuff day...9/10, I’m really into history and it was a great excuse to walk my favourite section of the Thames.
On the way back home from Tower Hill I saw this in the station for Dr. Seuss Day. Nice to see other people celebrating!
