Day 5 – Kew Gardens, Tate Modern and the Globe Theater

Jeanne in Kew Gardens

We started the day with a visit to Kew Gardens, which is alongside the Thames on the west side of London and about a 20 minute ride Uber ride from our hotel.  Kew Gardens is very large (300 acres) and claims that their “collection of living plants is the largest and most diverse in the world.” We can vouch for the size as we pretty much walked it from end to end and although we saw all of the highlights, there's still a lot of the garden that we did not see.

Open Space in Kew Gardens

The gardens were nice, but this probably wasn’t the optimum time to visit if you wanted to see flowers. We apparently just missed the Cherry Blossoms and were too early the peak of Spring flowers.  There were large, beautiful fields of bluebells around Queen Charlotte’s Cottage, rhododendrons in bloom and vast expanses where you could just picture the king going out for a ride back in the day.

View of St. Paul's and the Millennium Bridge

In the afternoon, we took tube to St. Paul and walked across the Millennium Bridge over the Thames to go the Tate Modern museum. While many of the National Landmarks controlled by the National Trust of England are very expensive to visit, the museums in London are free.  The Tate is actually a group of several museums and the Tate Modern focuses on “modern art.”  In terms of the art in the museum, it was just okay. It has some really great pieces but also doesn’t seem to have the coverage you would expect. The MoMA in New York is better but that’s just my opinion.

Inside the Globe Theater

After the Tate and a dinner in a pub overlooking the Thames, we went to the Globe Theater to watch a production of Romeo and Juliet, but with a very modern twist. While it held oddly to the text of much of the original play, it replaced swords and poison with guns and featured a Capulet party with the song “YMCA.” A little bit odd but the play still holds up after nearly 500 years. The Globe theater is supposed to be an accurate replica of the original which burned down long ago.

By the way, if you are counting, we walked almost 8 1/2 miles today. That is probably a little more than normal because Kew Gardens is so massive but a typical walking day has been 5 or 6 miles, even using mass transit as well as we can.