Model Forum / General / Models / July 2006

I heard once that Cutty Sark has the lowest headroom of all. It was
supposedly to stop sailors from taking a nap by lying on the tea chests
stored below decks.

(kim)

Rob  wrote

No problems... of course, if you're after planes, and you're in the vicinity
of London, there's

(a) RAF Hendon, the RAF museum [
http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/london/index.cfm ] ; accessible by getting off
the underground at Colindale Station, and walking for a bit.  Remember to
turn LEFT on leaving the station, otherwise you walk a long way until you
find someone who knows where the museum is.  I couldn't see any signs for it
until it was more or less visible, and it's just off the edge of the A-Z
street maps.  Well worth a visit, though.

(b) The Duxford branch of the IWM [
http://duxford.iwm.org.uk/server.php?show=nav.00d ], which I can't say
anything about because I've only been past it on the train (but the train
was going into London, which at least implies you could catch a train out to
get there).  Looking at the website, I notice it costs £13 to get into
Duxford, which might be a reason I haven't been.  There are a few planes
hanging from ceiling at the main Imperial War Museum in Lambeth (get off the
tube at Lambeth North - in theory you can walk from Waterloo station, in
practice it's nigh impossible to get out of Waterloo if you follow the
signs)

(c) The Flight Gallery of the Science Museum in South Kensington [
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/flight/  ].  Mostly models, but a
few real planes as well.  They've left their SE5a as one of Col. Savage's
inter-war skywriting planes, unlike Hendon, who decided they wanted a more
military appearance.  Obviously, the rest of the Science Museum [
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk ] is filled with technological things of
various sorts.

For massive mechanical weirdness, if you're in London on the first Sunday of
the month, there's the Kirkaldy Testing Museum  [ no website, but contact
details at
http://www.visitlondon.com/city_guide/itemDetail/7X12235D.html?categoryNodeId=20
81&browse=true ]
in Southwark, which is mostly an impressive Victorian device used to twist,
compress, stretch, shear and general mess around with samples of metal to
find out their breaking points.  It's about 47 foot long, weighs 116 tons
(which is why, when the Kirkaldy family sold the purpose-built building it's
in, the new owners just resigned themselves to not having a ground floor),
and still works.  It's run by volunteers, hence the rather limited opening
hours.  The building looks rather as if it was built around the machine.
Even if you're not there when it's supposed to be opening, it's worth
ringing a bit ahead, to see if anyone's going to be there - we got in on a
Thursday afternoon because the curator had to show a TV producer around.