Tuesday 17 August 2010

A Grand Day Out.

We had a lovely day in London yesterday. The weather was just right and there was room to walk on the pavements.
We started at the British Museum where we went to look at Sir Percival David's collection. It is amazing, some of the things take your breath away. I've chosen a few of the things I liked best to show you,

these are a thousand years old!

As you can see the porcelain is so thin on these wine cups you can see through them.


This is about three feet in diameter, apparently the potters had difficulty with this size of thing warping. This one looked ok, I wonder how many they made to get to this one?



The pottery in these three cabinets looks very modern, in fact everything was made in the early part of the 15th century
This was one of my favourite pieces

it's about three feet tall and it came from a Buddhist temple, it was made in 1320. I would have loved to have taken it home.
It is a fantastic collection, I think we will be visiting it again

From the museum we walked to the Japan Centre. This is in Regents Street. We walked down Shaftesbury Avenue where we saw this shop

seems an odd thing to find in the middle of London but it obviously manages to keep trading. Near to Piccadilly Circus we saw this

there was no sign on the building as to its original function, does anyone know what it was? The figures were very elegant, there is also a fountain at ground level. I couldn't get a picture of that as there were too many people.

At the Japan Centre we had a good mooch round, it's great fun looking at all the weird and wonderful things. We did buy some buns but I'm afraid they didn't last long enough to photo! Unfortunately I didn't manage to buy any craft books as they have moved them all to their recently opened book shop, which we didn't manage to visit. That gives me the perfect excuse to visit again.

Sue x

7 comments:

  1. Amazing pottery...to think it is over 1000 years old is incredible. Isn't it great we get the opportunity to see these things.

    Sounds like a lovely day out.

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  2. So love the British Museum - one of the few things I miss about our move to the Midlands, we used to be able to get to central London in 15 mins from where we lived before.

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  3. Brilliant - we should do a Bloggers' meet up there. I went to the V & A with a blogger friend to see the Quilt exhibition - great fun

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  4. A great day out - I haven't been in London for many years ..... I might have to start dropping hints to Malcolm about a trip!

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  5. How beautiful - there's nothing new under the sun, is there!

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  6. Thanks for dropping by into my little blog over at laburnum cottage. Lovely photos of your London visit. Oh, and the book I mentioned in the blog? It is '50 Things that really matter' published by Gift Books from Hallmark cards. It came to me from a dear friend in New England, so I don't know if it can be bought here. It's not on Amazon.co.uk... maybe .com has it I don't know. But it's one of those lovely little books for dipping into now and then, to remind ourselves of the smaller, simpler things in life that are as important, if not more so, than the bigger things.

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  7. I'm looking forward to taking the children up to the London museums, one day. I used to love going. Looks like you enjoyed your trip.

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