2025 London Day 6: The Victoria & Albert Museum

 Friday, August 29, 2025

We both slept poorly overnight and didn’t get up until 930A. Feeling sluggish, we both settled for cereal for breakfast. Most importantly, however, we decided to simplify our day and punted on revisiting The Design Museum and limiting ourselves to just The Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. This turned out to be a great decision as the V&A was this trip’s “surprise attraction”. We ended up spending about 4 hours at the museum and would have gladly stayed longer if we’d had the energy. There were just so many wonderful exhibits.

Hanging in a central location is a Chihuly glass chandelier. I’m guessing it was about 25’-30’ high. The minotaur fight was a sculpture that was about 2’ high.

In the Hall of Casts were many life-size castings of famous works from around the world, most of them adding to the museum in the 19th century. What was most surprising was the size of the David statue. Neither of us had any idea that the original was so large. I personally thought that it was human-sized. There was also a cast of Trajan's Column.

Miscellaneous casts:

Achilles being dipped into the River Styx, and La Gorgone:

While there we grabbed lunch at their garden café (we shared a nice ham sandwich, crisps, and grapes) while watching children play in the wading pond.



We finally left around 330P. On a very crowded train back we discovered that we’re old: both of us were offered seats by a pair of 20-something girls!

Dinner was at Port House, a tapas place on The Strand. It was really good, especially the Arroz Portugese and the giant Gin and Tonic <g>.

After sampling several dishes we ended the night by with a final trip to Amorino and then packed our bags in prep for tomorrow’s trip to Southampton and the start of our trans-Atlantic cruise!