Spitalfields Market & The Geffrye Museum

For last week's Nice Day Out I headed to East London where I met up with Sarah from Blooming Felt.

Sarah and I met in person for the first time last year at the Knitting & Stitching Show but we've both been in "the felt biz" for years. It was great to get together and have a good natter and - rather amazingly - we managed to talk about some stuff other than felt! (Mmm... lovely felt...)

First we headed to Spitalfields market and wandered round the antiques market happening that day, oohing over lots of interesting bits and pieces.

 

Then we went for a walk...

 

... up to Columbia Road (I must remember to come back here one Sunday to visit the flower market!) Isn't this mosaic wall lovely?

Thanks to my terrible map-reading skills (note to self: check the name of the road you need to go down instead of just heading in what you think is the right general direction) we then got a bit lost...

 

... but eventually (thanks to a kind local who gave us directions) found our way to the Geffrye Museum.

We had a delicious lunch in their restaurant and then explored the museum.

The Geffrye is the "museum of the home", showcasing how the British middle classes have lived over the centuries. There's a whole series of period rooms arranged chronologically from the 1600s right through to the 1990s, with interesting displays and info about how people lived at the time and the kinds of furniture, decoration and objects they would have had in their homes.

There are also some lovely reading rooms with shelves of books about homes & decor and gardens & gardening as well as lots of interior design magazines and house and home -themed childrens books... and outside there's a series of period gardens. The gardens were closed during out visit but it was nice to look out at them during lunch and from the windows of the charming garden reading room (a narrow, curving wooden extension on the back of the building - you can see it here).

I'm definitely going to come back here for a return visit in the summer months to see the gardens and have a nose through some of those books!