2025 London Day 4: The Museum of the Home

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

We’d previously been to the Geffrye Museum (now renamed The Museum of the Home) with the boys in 2014 and found it fascinating. This time, however, E and I planned to make use of the audio guide for ADULTS rather than the family guide we’d used with the boys. Further, I hoped we could also take the guided tour of Almshouse 14. Not sure if that had been an option back in 2014 or not but it sounded interesting.

As it happens, the museum has made some changes since we last were there. Sadly, the guided audio is no longer offered. Additionally, some of the older sitting rooms have been removed, with many of the artifacts being repurposed for standard display case style exhibits. They’ve also revised some of the sitting rooms and really leaned into social issues further. For example, what used to be the 1960’s sitting room was now revised to reflect (IIRC) Caribbean culture, while others focused on a lesbian setting, an Indian setting, and a futuristic setting. While still interesting, it was not the experience we’d hoped to have and we were somewhat disappointed by our followup visit. We also missed the Almshouse 14 tour by about 10 minutes!

I’d also intended to make Dennis Sever’s House our afternoon destination, having gone so far as to contact them earlier in the year to confirm that they were going to be open during the time of our visit. While the house was open, it was only open on weekends during our time in London so couldn’t follow through. I had a backup plan to visit Victoria Embankment Garden if we hadn’t already done so on the 1st day in town, or potentially check out the shops at Covent Garden. Instead, we opted for the relaxation route and, after first stopping at a Pret on Villiers Street and buying a sandwich and chips (crisps) to share, which we took back to the room and enjoyed. After that, I napped HARD for 40 minutes.

Post-nap, we wandered back to Villiers Street to investigate the cheesy souvenir shops to see if we could find anything for the kids and/or a Christmas ornament, but we came up empty-handed. Also tried to find a geocache on Lower Water Street, but based on recent DNFs it looked like the cache had gone missing about 10 days ago. I noted that the pipe that was the probable GZ seemed to have new water sealant around it, so my theory is that the city had just recently repaired something and removed the cache at the same time.

On the way back to the room in order to get ready for dinner and our theater tickets we stopped to look at the Eleanor Cross outside Charing Cross Station.

Finally, we set out for dinner at Prezzo (London St Martin’s Lane). For a chain restaurant it was pretty good. I had The Spicy One pizza while E tried the Spaghetti Carbonara. We both had side salads. After dinner we walked just past the theater to a gelato place (la Gelatiera in Covent Garden) for dessert – it was OK, but not close to the quality of Amorino!

In April 2025 I looked online for all the shows, music, and comedy events that might be possible while in London. I’d already ruled out 2:30P matinees performances, but after some thought I decided that a 7:30P show wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, especially since so many theaters were less than 10 minutes walking distance from The Clermont. Among the possibilities we selected “The Comedy About Spies” at the Noel Coward Theatre. This show was presented by Mischief Theatre, the same folks who produced “The Show That Goes Wrong” and similar fare.

The show was hysterical. They maintained the farcical pace from start to finish, and the show was VERY physically demanding on the cast. We saw all the prime cast except for Nancy Zamit, who apparently had the night off. Our seats were in the 2nd row of the Dress Circle and were excellent. We had an fantastic time and the 2:30 minute show (including intermission) passed by in a flash. We made the quick walk back to the hotel in reasonably quiet streets and arrived back in our room by 1010P.