On Friday I went to London with my partner, Laura, for a grand day of culture. We started off at the Wellcome Collection where Laura was interested in seeing the War + Medicine exhibition. I would thoroughly recommend a visit to this museum to anyone with even the slightest interest in science. The two permanent exhibitions, Medicine Now and Medicine Man are well worth your time. It’s a relatively small museum so I reckon you could do the whole thing in a couple of hours. I’ll tell you about the highlights of my visit later on.

After lunch at Rowley’s we moved on the the V&A. As this is a monster of a musuem we decided to pick out a few areas we particularly wanted to see. I chose the William Morris and photography galleries. I would also have liked to see the 20th Century gallery but we got a little lost. This did allow us a little longer to spend in the cafe which I would thoroughly recommend especially for a spot of afternoon tea.

As we were so close we popped in to the Natural History Museum where we zipped around a gallery devoted to the human body.

Now on to the highlights of my day:

• At the Wellcome Collection I had my biometric identity turned in to a graphic icon (image shown). This was part of the Medicine Now exhibit. The machine collects you pulse rate, height, age, fingerprint and iris pattern then based on this data generates a unique graphic.
• Also in the Medicine Now exhibit there’s an interesting piece of art by Ellie Harrison who photographed everything she ate for a year. You can see the result of this project on her website, Eat 22.
• In the War + Medicine exhibition there is a section on developments in reconstructive surgery as a result of war. The piece that particularly stood out to me here was a sculpture which encorporated the medical notes of a serviceman who had undergone facial reconstructive surgery. This sculpture is part of Paddy Hartley’s Project Facade.
• In the photography gallery at the V&A there was one image that I wanted to find out more about. It was of a nun just going about her everyday business in the convent. This is part of a project called Perfect Intimacy by Lili Almog.