Thursday, August 6

Thursday dawned with the realization that our time in London was drawing to a close! It seemed like a month would be more than ample time to see and do everything I ever wanted to do in the London area, but once again, time has slipped away. On the agenda for the next trip to London--the Banqueting House, the Public Records Office, the renovated Museum of London. . .

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We headed down along the river to the County Hall to visit the Movieum of London and the current exhibition. The "London on Film" exhibit offered loads of interesting props and other items from a number of movies including Star Wars, Terminator, Gladiator and several of the Harry Potter films. Getty Images had a terrific display of photographs of the Beatles, taken primarily during their tour of the Far East in 1966.

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It was fun to see many iconic props from movies like this of Han Solo in suspension from Star Wars.

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After a busy morning sightseeing, we met Dr. Welsh in the Courtyard for the trip to the British Library Centre for Conservation. This new (opened in October 2007) facility was designed with a "sawtooth" roof allowing in northern light to aid in conservation efforts. A number of conservators were working on a variety of different items when our tour commenced. We watched one gentleman replace the silk stitched headband of a book after which he explained to us what steps he had taken in the conversation process with that volume. He had removed the front and back boards (which were not original) and was replacing them with new acid free boards which would later be leather bound. The old boards would be placed along with the newly bound book in an archival container for posterity's sake. We then moved to the next workstation where another gentleman who was farther along in the same process with a different volume replaced the leather along the spine. He moved deftly through each step, describing to us the process and the whys and wherefores of each step. We looked around the room a bit and saw conservators working, with great care and precision, on a number of different items. We stopped to admire the tooling brasses displayed in the hall and received a brief explanation of that process.

We had a few minutes to look around the library and admire the great tower of books donated by King Charles. We bought some postcards in the gift shop then it was back to Stamford Street.

Later a quick train trip took us to Kingston where we had a lovely dinner with good friends. A great time was had by all as another fun day in London drew to a close.