A Visit to London’s
Science Museum
The main
space gallery contains a plethora or rockets, engines and planetary probes.
Introduction
If it’s the
school holidays again and if you’re looking for a way to prize the kids away
from their screens, the London museums are always good value.
I recently
read a piece by some numpty columnist saying that we all secretly hate museums.
Well the opposite is true for me. I absolutely love museums and always have. I
refuse to apologise. I grew up with trips to the Science Museum and have the
fondest memories of glass cases full of models that came alive when you pressed
a button, of towering steam engines and of course … telescopes and rockets!
Sadly for me
the Science Museum has changed over the years to become more of an ‘exploratorium’ than a traditional museum. Doubtless that
columnist is thrilled, but I’m sad to see the gallery full of ship models and
the flight galleries with their dusty old planes disappear.
The museum
now seems to be in transition, with a lot of empty floor space and some pretty
chaotic displays that remind me of an Enlightenment ‘cabinets of curiosities’ –
a step backwards into the nineteenth century.
The Science
Museum still has lots of space and astronomy exhibits, but apart from the main
space section, they are thinly spread throughout the museum. So I thought I’d
collect them together here so you can hunt them down a bit more easily if you
find yourself in South Kensington with an hour or two to spare, perhaps while
the children are doing the Exploratorium thing.
First, I’ll
go through the basic tourist information – skip the next section if you’ve been
before.
How to get
there
The Science
Museum is part of a cluster in South Kensington that include the Victoria and
Albert (much less stuffy than it sounds and great for art, sculpture and
design), the Natural History with its famous dinosaurs and the less well known
Geology Museum.
South
Kensington has a tube station and is just a few stops from the West End. Then
it’s a short walk up Museum Road. There’s also a tunnel that connects the
station with the Natural History and V&A directly – good when it’s raining
but maybe not late at night.
Alternatively
you could try walking. I regularly do this now and really enjoy it. If you’re
coming in from the north, the walk from Kings Cross, St Pancras or Euston takes
less than an hour and can be varied to take in Oxford Street, Hyde Park, or
even Trafalgar Square and then the Mall and Buckingham Palace. You could easily
fit in other museums and galleries en-route and make
a day of it: the British Museum, National and Portrait Galleries and Wallace
Collection are all vaguely on the way, depending which route you take.
You could
doubtless devise interesting routes from other mainline or tube stations.
London is a pleasurable place to be out and about in now, so very different
from the grim and grimy city of my youth.
Ground Floor
Main Space Galleries
For space
and astronomy fans there is the obvious section on space – it’s
right behind the steam engines on the ground floor and you can’t miss it. I
won’t dwell too much on it here, except to say it has lots of good stuff on
rockets and probes with plenty of interesting models and displays from
Goddard’s experimental 1920s liquid fuelled rockets through Apollo to Cassini.
‘Making the Modern World’ galleries
In the large
hall behind the space galleries are a hotchpotch of interesting exhibits
loosely brought together under the title ‘Making the Modern World’. This hall
contains lots of astronomy and space displays, hidden among jet cars, steam
trains and experimental aircraft. The first astronomy item is on the right at
the very start – a case containing Caroline Herschel’s telescope, William
Herschel’s mirror grinder and the speculum mirror from his great forty-inch
telescope.
Herschel’s
original 49” mirror for his forty-foot reflector
Immediately
past the Herschel display is a staircase on the right. Take it and you arrive
in a long mezzanine gallery that leads towards a gleaming DC4 airliner hanging
from the roof. The cases along this gallery have a multitude of astronomy and
space arcana, from a model of the Paris telescope (the largest refractor ever
made) to an Airfix Saturn V kit identical to the one
you had (yes, I wish I’d kept mine too) and one of Nasmyth’s
original lunar surface models.
Nasmyth’s
1870 model of the Lunar crater surface around Maurolycus
Model of the
Paris Exposition Telescope – the largest refractor ever built
Airfix kit
of the Saturn V – like the one I had!
Back on the
ground floor of the hall, at the back, towers a V2 rocket, with a panel removed
showing the engine. As you doubtless know, the V2 was a Nazi ‘vengeance’ weapon
before being liberated by the Americans and Soviets to become the forerunner of
all liquid fuelled boosters, Saturn V included.
1945 V2
Rocket
To the right
of the V2, along the wall, is perhaps the most haphazard display case you’ll
find in any museum. But there among such worthy items as an original Soda
Stream are a couple of vintage telescopes. The most interesting is a beautiful
1885 Cooke refractor on a massive alt-azimuth mount that’s partly hidden
betwixt a plate camera and a barrel organ! Sadly, the display doesn’t say
anything more about this fine telescope, but I’m guessing it’s a four-inch.
Nearby is a handsome spyglass.
1885 Cooke
Refractor
At the back
of the hall is one of the museum’s highlights for space enthusiasts –the
Command Module from Apollo 10. Take a moment here. That capsule has been around
the Moon, something no object on Earth has done since the early Seventies and
which is way beyond current
capabilities.
Before we
leave the ‘Making the Modern World’ hall, it’s worth taking a moment to seek
out the cases set against the opposite wall. Here you’ll find various astronomy
exhibits, including a Dollond transit telescope and a
model Sputnik.
Apollo 10
Command Module (yes, the real thing!)
First Floor
The Science
Museum’s main astronomy display is tucked away above the front of the ‘Making
the Modern World’ hall. To be honest, it’s not the most attractive display and
again all sorts of objects seem to collide randomly in the cases, but there is
some interesting stuff up here.
To start
with you are confronted with Nasmyth’s canon-like 24”
telescope, with which he made the most detailed maps of the Moon and the 3D
model we saw along the mezzanine gallery. The telescope is significant for its
design: the first of its kind that uses a third mirror to place the eyepiece
conveniently at the altitude pivot. From the look of the holes at the top of
the tube, it used to be a Newtonian; presumably Nasmyth
got tired of wobbling on a step ladder (if you own a giant Dob’ this will sound
familiar).
Nasmyth’s
24” reflector
Behind the Nasmyth reflector is an oblong space with cases on all
sides. The left hand case contains all sorts of items, including a Newtonian
made essentially from junk and a Zeiss planetarium projector.
The main
display has another giant speculum as its centre-piece – this time
it’s the mirror from the 72” Ross telescope, then and for many years the
largest in the world.
Speculum
from the Ross telescope
Nearby is a
tall case full of brass telescopes – mostly table-top Georgian or Victorian Cassegrains and refractors by the look of them - that
reaches to the roof. For those like me with a closer interest in telescopes it
could do with being at eye level.
Perhaps my
favourite part of this gallery is the case set directly behind the Nasmyth display. This houses a replica of Galileo’s early
refractor and Newton’s first reflector. Alongside is a copy (original, by the
looks of it) of Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius (‘Starry Messenger’) in which he set out his early
observations of the Moon and planets.
Models of
Galileo’s and Newton’s early telescope alongside a copy of ‘Siderius
Nuncius’
Incidentally,
if you choose to walk to the Science Museum from Kings Cross or St Pancras,
you’ll pass another freely viewable copy of this book – at the British Library
on Euston Road. The same permanent exhibition also has an original letter by
Galileo amongst its treasures. Galileo, you’ll discover, had beautiful handwriting.
That’s about
it for the astronomy and space exhibits that I know of at the Science Museum,
although if you carry on through the astronomy gallery you come to the clock
section which contains some splendid mechanical chronographs for those of a horological bent. Meanwhile, the new ‘Communications’
gallery hides the odd satellite model.