The collection moves around quite a bit, from my understanding, so its quite possible you can not see Beatles lyrics on a napkin, either.
But yes, currently its the big Magna Carta festival which is a fee exhibit. But without the Magna Carta, the treasures room still has lots to offer.
(My daughter, looking at the treasures room, was “I’ve seen one of those, and one of those” for both the Gutenberg Bible and the Magna Carta - we’d been to Washington DC a few years before. She was impressed with the da Vinci notebook).
Thanks everyone, there’s a lot to work with here. The British Library is a definite add, as is the bus tour, and we’re still looking at the rest. Too bad we don’t have more time there!
All righty then, this turned out to effectively be four days, not five, and we visited:
The Imperial War Museum
Churchill War Rooms
British Museum
British Library (really just the Magna Carta exhibit)
Museum of London
Tower of London
Westminster Abbey
St. Paul’s Cathedral
WB Studios Harry Potter Tour
It turned out my son’s attention span was about 2 to 2.5 hours for each site, except the British Museum, where we spent four hours and he frankly wore me out…I finally settled on a bench in Asia and let him wander. We fly home tomorrow and I’m dead on my feet, but what a great experience.
I’ve been to a lot of natural history museums and London’s is far and away the best, IMHO (it is, after all, the original.) On one level it’s still just reproduction dinosaur skeletons but it’s much better done than any other I’ve visited. I may or may not be slightly biased since the life-sized (but somewhat inaccurate) blue whale model was my favorite thing in the world as a kid.