The huge London science museums are the most impressive, of course, but the smaller ones are interesting, too, and have the advantage of not taking hours and hours on different occasions to see all they offer.

Near the British Library, on Euston Road, is the relatively new, and narrowly focused, Wellcome Collection. I visited it with my colleague's history of science class; here's my blog post about the trip. The focus of the museum is medicine and health, but very broadly interpreted. Here are a couple of the exhibits. On the left are samples from the famous cloned sheep, Dolly. And an amazing representation of how complex the human genome is—the books in the middle are all full of text like the example on the right!

An even smaller museum, with an even narrower focus, is the Garden Museum, located in the former St. Mary-at-Lambeth church. I visited it late in my London stay, so the church's grounds were not at their best, I'm sure—in the spring, I can just imagine what it would look like! (Here is my blog post covering the Museum and other outings that day.)

The Museum's limited collection was interesting, but I particularly enjoyed the humorous touches, like the quote below about potatoes (which I'd love to be able to grow in my garden!). And the tiny Lambeth neighborhood display, with this rather spooky look down into the crypt below the church (you can't actually go downstairs), which was orginally built in medieval times, similar to nearby Lambeth Palace.

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich isn't exactly a small museum, but it does have a somewhat narrow focus. At least, its name indicates a narrow focus, but I discovered, as with many areas covered by London's wonderful museums, there's always more to a subject than you know before you tour the museum! Here are three very different aspects of maritime history—the optic from a Scottish lighthouse, a ship's doctor's case (which reminded me of Master and Commander), and one of the Museum's nifty boat models:

You can read a little more about my visit to this Museum in this blog post. And I took more pictures there that you can see in the Flickr set.

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