British Museum
Continuing our Tuesday tradition of visiting National institutions, we saw the ever impressive British Museum - and were taken into the Round Reading Room! That doesn't get shown or opened to the public anymore! Once again, we were all in awe. And I was very thankful for joining the field I did. The Museum uses the room for storage now, which is not ideal, but solved their more immediate problem of space for the time being until a more permanent solution is decided upon. We were led around the perimeter to different portions of the collections and I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one who wanted to work there by the end of the visit.
After our tour we were let loose to explore the rest of the Museum on our own, which is absolutely massive. Rather than try and sum up all of it, I'll touch on two of my favorite rooms: the King's Library, and the Parthenon fragments.
The King's Library is a long, beautiful room that houses King George III's collection, donated by George IV. Each corner and spare wall space had glass-fronted bookshelves, and there was a maze of statues and artifacts throughout the middle that George III collected. It was stunning.
The King's Library is a long, beautiful room that houses King George III's collection, donated by George IV. Each corner and spare wall space had glass-fronted bookshelves, and there was a maze of statues and artifacts throughout the middle that George III collected. It was stunning.
Room 18 holds the Parthenon fragments the British Museum has on hand, and again it was a massive room that was overwhelming in itself, which served to illustrate the great expanse the original Parthenon would have taken up. As I lived in Nashville previously, and have been to the full-scale replica located in Centennial Park, I had an idea of how massive the original would have been.
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