There is only one way to arrive at Greenwich and that is by boat. (In fact if you’re coming from the centre of town this is the quickest way to travel) but the main reason for travelling by river is that it allows you to pretend you are in fact royalty visiting your Palaces in Greenwich.
My journey to Greenwich today was unfortunately not as a queen visiting her riverside palace but as an intrepid London explorer ticking off another gallery. I went to see the current Samuel Pepys exhibition at the National Maritime Museum.
I’m currently writing a tour of The City of London for kids and Samuel Pepys has featured strongly in my research as he’s diaries paint him as such a colourful character. He will obviously need to be slightly censored for younger ears.
The exhibition was excellent. There seems to be a fashion currently to curate exhibitions in themes (colours, cities, etc) which I often find quite confusing. Luckily, this exhibition was curated by good old fashioned chronology spanning from the death of Charles I in 1649 to Pepys death in 1701.
There were a huge amount of varied items used to tell the story. I saw the gloves Charles I wore to his execution (lent by the Archbishop of Canterbury) a court dress with a gorgeous lace scarf (lent by the Montegu family), the original transcript of Pepys diary (lent by Cambridge university).
The items of historical value were all enclosed, so no need to constantly try to stop small sticky fingers touching things. That’s not to say there was nothing to play with, there were interactive maps of Pepys London, and an amazing map showing how the fire cut through the city in 1666. The most interesting and gruesome exhibit was a timeline of plague deaths by month through 1664 & 5. The level of those dying culminating in September with over 20 thousand depths. For the first time I could begin to visualise the massive volume of Londoners who were simply wiped out by plague.
I visited at a quiet time but the interactive elements of the exhibition made the whole experience very noisy and evocative of London during Pepys time.
There were a few surprising facts about the man (which I’m sure most people already knew). (1) He only wrote the diary for 9 years – the way it was sold to me a school was a lifelong magnum opus. (2) Pepys lived much longer then his wife, poor long suffering Elizabeth died when she was only 29 years and Samuel went on to out live her for 34 years, never remarrying (maybe it really was love) (3) He was genuinely famous in his lifetime, I’d thought that he was posthumously well known because of his diaries but it turns out he was THE restoration man about town.
The exhibition is on until the end of March and I’d recommend a trip. Small people would also enjoy it and I’m sure they’d approve of arriving by boat.
If you want to listen to the curators check out this Londonist Podcast.