Things To Do And Places To Go In London With A Toddler

“Wow!” my daughter exclaimed as she ran up to the display case. “Come look this big one.”

We were just off the entrance hall of the Natural History Museum in London’s Kensington district. Above us was ‘Hope’, the 25m blue whale skeleton installed in the hall in 2017; alongside us all manner of fascinations, from a meteorite, to a mastodon display, to a fossilised tree millions of years old. But Alice didn’t give those much more than a cursory glance. She was, after all, just under two-years-old and had the attention span of, well, a two-year-old.

It was a giant, 300kg piece of coral she was fascinated by. And when she was done, she wanted one more thing: “Dinosaur.” Truth be told, that’s what my wife, Megan, and I also wanted.

The anamatronic T-Rex in the dinosaur gallery is one of the museum’s great attractions. Life-size and eerily realistic, it’s a flashback to the world’s prehistoric past when giant lizards roamed and ruled. Alice was equal parts terrified and fascinated.

“Daddy, I scared,” she said, wrapping her arms around my neck. But she wouldn’t take her eyes off the creature just a few metres away.

Megan convinced her that the dinosaur – which Alice would later tell me is named the “Two-Rex” – was friendly and was saying hello to her. She loved that damn Two-Rex, and made us go around the entire dinosaur section a second time before we headed out onto the wet and wintry November streets of London.

The Natural History Museum was one of a number of places we visited while in London on a week-long holiday last year. It’s a great place to take a toddler, even one who was just under 2-years-old — and the older the kid, the more they’ll enjoy it.

Over the next few articles I’ll share some hints and tips when traveling with a toddler (in general) and also specifics of traveling to London with a toddler. Here, in part 1, I’ll deal with Things To Do And Places To Go:

Natural History Museum

Meg and Alice outside the Natural History Museum.

London Zoo

Kew Gardens

Winter Wonderland

British Museum

One of the

Camden

Be outdoors. Because of weather we didn’t hit a lot of the outdoors places, but Meg and I have done a few of them before. In no particular order, consider:Hyde Park;
1. Changing of the guards;
1. Buckingham Palace;
1. Kensington Gardens (including the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground); and
1. Walk along the Thames (it’s got all the postcard sites like Big Ben, Tower Bridge, London Bridge, Houses of Parliament, London Eye, etc.)