Kensington & Barbican

Once the private gardens of a Palace, Kensington Gardens is now open to all. One of London’s eight Royal Parks, it covers 265 acres. On a beautiful Saturday morning we began Day Two of our self-guided London Tour at the Gardens’  Victoria statue, replanted to celebrate the 200th anniversary of her birth. Her name was everywhere in London; her memory truly lives on.Next we enjoyed the wide variety of play spaces tucked away in a far less formal place, the Princess Diana Memorial Playground. Violet and lots of lucky kids loved climbing, sliding, and swinging. Not too far away, we discovered the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, a fountain you could walk through and feel Diana’s love for children swishing through your feet.

Lilli was particularly interested in seeing the Serpentine Gallery, really two galleries a 5-minute walk apart. Every year the Serpentine Gallery commissions a temporary summer pavilion by a leading architect who has not completed a building in England at the time of the Gallery’s invitation. Each Pavilion is situated on the Gallery’s lawn for three months for the public to explore. In 2016 I had seen this work by Bjarke Ingels:

This year’s guest architect is Jun’ya Ishigami, who designed a sloping roof of slate.

For lunch, we walked across to the other Serpentine Gallery, The Magazine, a former gunpowder storehouse. In the extension added by Zaha Hadid Architects in 2012, we found a delicious lunch. And in the original gallery, also known as the Sackler Serpentine, we discovered an exhibit, I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn, by Luchita Hurtado. Turns out she is 98 and having her first show in a public gallery! I really liked her abstract paintings of words.

 

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Here are three more delights that we encountered in Kensington Gardens.

It took us neophytes over an hour to find our way from Kensington Gardens to the Barbican Centre. I had booked tickets for a matinee performance of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. It may have won an award for Best Musical Revival, but it so compressed and distorted Jesus’s message and so overwhelmed my eardrums, that I was left to wonder why the capacity crowd applauded when Jesus was crucified.

The silver lining was finding an excellent outdoor restaurant at Barbican Centre and a fascinating exhibit on Artificial Intelligence (AI). A video entitled Brainbow, by Jeff Lichtman and the Lichtman Lab at Harvard, explained how AI is facilitating brain research and impressed me with how this field has advanced since my brother Joel retired as a neuropathologist twenty years ago. 

There were many other intriguing displays in the multi-floor exhibit. I studied a comparison of number systems, while Violet interacted with an AI video.

Six miles walked, seventeen floors climbed, several memorials and sculptures observed, two exhibits and a beautiful park enjoyed–we were all smiles at the end of our second day in London.