I am excited to have finally made it to London - I have wanted to visit since I was a child! After a slow start catching up on sleep and recovering from jetlag, we spent the afternoon exploring London's inner west, and it was everything we had hope it would be. 

I will post about each individual place we visited to keep posts short and easy to find. You will find all posts from each individual day here and you can also click on the date beneath the heading on each tile.   

Here are some pics to start off the London posts - a black taxi cab along Brompton Road, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Prince Albert Hotel in Notting Hill Gate (taken from the top level of a red double decker bus!).

Family history connection

You'll notice that I've tagged London as family history, a special area of interest for me. I'm always fascinated to find out about ordinary people who made the extraordinary decision to uproot their lives to the other side of the world in the hope of finding a better life. Having just spent around 24 hours flying from Melbourne to London, I can only imagine how gruelling it would have been to make the same journey by ship over several months with no electricity, a high risk of disease, and so many other dangers to contend with (even pirates!). These stories are all the more interesting when they're about your own ancestors. 

My great x 3 grandfather on my Dad's Bartlett side, Isaac Ham, was born in London in 1831. He came out to Australia in the 1850s goldrush and married Elizabeth Watson from Scotland, in Geelong. They settled in the goldmining village of Walhalla north east of Melbourne, and their daughter Allison Alicia Bartlett (nee Ham) was my great great grandmother.