Wednesday, June 24, 2009

SWOON! (and gosh, I'm a bit dim)

I found a house for my characters in the first novel I finished, the one that I asked a few people to read. It's a nice 5 story row house/townhouse in Kensington. Very upper-middle-class sort of place with gardens in the middle of the road and I can easily conflate that section of the road with the one with mews behind them so we can have a back gate on the garden. I was just messing around in Google, looking for a likely place - I think I mentioned this at the time. This was a few months ago.

I was just now futzing around in my London A to Z (that's ZED for you Americans. Not ZEE.) and realized that the Natural History Museum is RIGHT THERE.

My heroine has a lifelong fascination with zoology and corresponds with Darwin's daughter.

So I looked up the Natural History Museum online and it moved to its present location in 1881. My book is set in 1881.

(BTW it's a great place, don't know why I didn't think to fit it or any other museums into the story before)

So life is good. They needed someplace to go and this will be new and exciting and fun. I wonder what month in 1881 it opened there, because that will determine where in the story I put it. And I wonder about its hours and what was there and... well, so on. Not much history on the website as far as I can see.

And does anyone know if Holland Park was open to the public in 1881? I love Holland Park.

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