London With Kids: The British Museum

Our fourth and last day in London. The previous 3 days had gone well (read more here, here, and here) and we were excited to stop by the British Museum on our way out.

British Museum
We checked out of our hotel and then took our luggage to the train station where they stored it for us. This was really great and didn’t take up too much extra time during our morning.

The British Museum was founded in 1753 and was the first national public museum in the world.

Sir Hans Sloane was a famous collector back then and left his collection to King George II after he died in exchange for £20,000 to his heirs. Later that year, the British Museum was established. By 1759, it was open to the public and those who were “studious and curious” could enter for free.

The best photo I could get of the Rosetta Stone

We didn’t have much time (we were planning on leaving by around 1ish), but we knew we wanted to see Ancient Greece and Egypt. Anything more than that would be awesome, but as long as we got to see those couple of exhibits, we were okay.

Assyrian statues

We found Ancient Greece pretty quickly. It was amazing. The different sculptures were all made of marble and showed bits and pieces of everyday life back then. We even saw sculptures and pillars that were once part of the Parthenon, which was a temple in Athens dedicated to Athena.

There was also a ton of Greek pottery! It was all so pretty and cool and we really enjoyed looking at them. Each vase told a story using pictures.

Next, we checked out a few of the Egyptian rooms. It was my first time ever seeing a mummy! It’s so crazy to think about how advanced the Egyptians were for their day. They had their own alphabet and even had a fully developed numeral system.

Adeline loved looking at everything. Here she is checking out some Egyptian pottery.

We grabbed a quick lunch at the museum and then headed back to the train station to catch our train home to Paris.

We only saw a very small part of the museum, but it was definitely still worth it! The museum is free and even if you can only spend an hour there, I highly recommend doing so. Both the girls did great. London walked most of the time and Adeline was in the stroller about half of the time. She actually took some of her first steps in one of the Egyptian rooms!

The train ride home went pretty well. This time we only had two seats for the 4 of us, but everyone did surprisingly well.

Overall, our trip to London was fantastic! We really enjoyed seeing everything that we could in our short amount of time. It was extremely family-friendly, probably the best we’ve visited so far with all the parks and museums (and good stroller access just about everywhere). We hope to go again soon!

For more information:

http://www.britishmuseum.org/visiting.aspx

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Daley Family Travels

"Not all those who wander are lost"