Free things in London: Natural History Museum

As you'll know if you've read my previous blogs, my boyfriend has recently move home to London after being at university so over the next few months I will be travelling to London a fair bit.

On this visit we went to the Natural History Museum. Getting to the museum was a bit of a nightmare after all north bound tubes where cancelled so we had to get a train to Victoria station in the centre and walk from there. It took us about 40 minutes to walk, although we saw some amazing London boroughs this way, including Chelsea and the amazing houses and hotels there.


We eventually made it to the Museum and ate a picnic outside as we are on major budgets right now, we then made our way into the museum. Now the reason I initially wanted to visit the Natural History Museum was for the dinosaurs, when I was in New York I desperately tried to get the the Natural History Museum there but never got chance and as you'll know they have a T-rex in their entrance hall and I presumed Londons museum would be similar.

I was however wrong, although we did have a great time there. The main hall was actually dedicated to mammals and there is a massive model of a blue whale that sits above the full length of the hall. It's difficult to actually take in how ginormous the whale is, especially when it is situated next to elephants and rhinos you can really see just how much larger it is than anything else.

In this hall they have all types of mammals from goats, to dolphins and huge elephant tusks unfortunately for me the giraffe wasn't on display which I was disappointed by as they are my favourite wild animal. Although the horse exhibits made up for it as they showed some amazing parts of their evolution. This first room goes on forever, over 2 floors and it is so easy to miss bits if you aren't careful. They even have a scale that tells you how many time more you favourite animal weights than you, 49 of me makes a giraffe apparently.

The next section is a human biology exhibit this part has loads of interactive stations such as optical illusions, machines where you can see hormones moving around the body and computers that test your memory. This room took us the longest there was so much information and we ended up skipping some parts as it was a bit much in the end and we had gone more for the animal skeletons and models rather than human biology.

Next we entered the dinosaur exhibit, this was small but great fun there is a room with a life size moving T-rex which was crazy to watch (if you follow me on Twitter you might have seen a video of it https://twitter.com/MLTravelBlog)You then follow a pathway zig zagging through the displays learning about dinosaurs and their timeline, I was surprised to learn how little we actually know about this part of time and how a lot of the things we know from films and TV is actually guess work. They where a few dinosaur fossils and life size model skeletons which was incredible to see the size that some of these creature grew too.

We where at the museum for about 4 hours and didn't see everything but we where knackered by this point and had seen as much as we wanted too so decided to go home for the day.

The museum was great and I definitely recommend it, theres something for everyone no mater what age and if you like animals then this is perfect. They have so many animal exhibitions such as wild cats, polar bears, whales, lots of elephant, sea life, extinct animals and much more! Then of course dinosaurs which will peak almost anyones interest!

Here is the link to the museum website if you would like to visit: http://www.nhm.ac.uk