THE PERSONAL ENRICHMENT LIST
​or, 49 things to do in London before you leave Tallis...

London is full of marvels, so many that you could spend a lifetime sampling them and not exhaust the possibilities. Whilst you're endeavouring to gain a few decent A level or BTEC results you ought to also consider nourishing your soul. London is a great place to do that. Here's a modest list of things we think will entertain, educate and otherwise improve you. Why not attempt to do the lot? Don't forget to tell your tutor when you've completed one of the challenges. Send photos of you at the relevant locations to this address. Use the same address to let us know if you have any suggestions for additions to the list.

Have fun!

The List:

1. Make a meal for your friends
2. Find your local MP (contact to climb Big Ben for free, know how they have voted, learn three key pieces of information about them)
3. Meet The Ambassadors and their anamorphic skull at the National Gallery
4. Read a ghost story in the café in Oxleas Woods, previously home to famous occultist Algernon Blackwood
5. Sing the chorus from 'I am the Walrus' to the walrus at The Horniman Museum
6. Walk part of the Green Chain Walk
7. Go to the South Bank Centre and listen to some music (Take the singing glass elevator in the Royal Festival Hall)
8. Take the Woolwich Ferry
9. Disconnect to reconnect one day a week (Take a Digital Detox)
10. Do a free park run
11. Walk the 21 bridges from Richmond to Tower Bridge
12. Check out the Magna Carta at The British Library
13. Ask the oldest person you know what it was like when they were 17 and make a short film of their answers
14. Visit Somerset House for a free exhibition
15. Buy a bunch of flowers at the Sunday morning market on Columbia Road or visit the fashion and food markets: Borough, Notting Hill
16. Work out how fast you walk
17. Climb to the top of Primrose Hill and draw the view
18. Yarn bomb your local park bench
19. Plant a vegetable seed. Harvest the vegetable. Eat the vegetable.
20. Visit the South London Gallery
21. Find a free sporting fixture
22. Write an IFTTT recipe
23. Talk to a goat at Mudchute City Farm
24. Watch an old film for free in the Mediatheque or watch a film on a rooftop
25. Check out your ancestors at the Grant Museum of Zoology
26. Get lost at The Barbican
27. Make a speech at Speakers’ Corner
28. Walk to the Isle of Dogs and back under the Thames
29. Visit an unusual building during Open House London
30. Picnic with a pelican in St. James’ Park
31. Visit the Scandal on the Strand
32. Take a barefoot selfie on the Abbey Road zebra crossing
33. Go to Highgate Cemetery, one of the 'Magnificent Seven' cemeteries of Victorian London.  Find the author of Das Kapital on the Tour. Visit George Eliot's grave, which is there too.  Then read 'Daniel Deronda'. 
34. Visit Nunhead Cemetery with a telescope and look across London to Highgate from the vantage point.  Then go on the tour of the catacombs under the ruined church.  (Once a year.  Spooky.)  Or find the Stearne Monument and, sitting nearby, read one of Cicero's 'Tusculan Disputations' (perhaps 'On the contempt of death' would be suitable?). Or find the Attic Monument of John Allan and read aloud the Iliad book 23: 106-261, where Patroclus' funeral pyre is raised.
35. Visit the Science Museum at night
36. Read some extraordinary tales of ordinary Londoners at Postman’s Park
37. Get some inspiration from The School of Life
38. Go to Sir John Soane's museum to examine the sarcophagus and then look at pickled syphilytic skulls in the Hunterian, opposite
39. Learn the Greek alphabet using Memrise
40. Read all of the published works of one author
41. Visit a place of worship that you’ve never been to before
42. Swim in a lido (Hampstead Heath, Charlton, London Fields, Brockwell Park)
43. Watch the Guards change at Buckingham Palace
44. Visit a festival e.g. Notting Hill Carnival
45. Attend a Tallis Thinking Aloud session
46. Attend a “Tallis Talk”
47. Find out about the drains.  Either visit the Crossness Pumping Engine, or write to Thames Water to see if they'll take you on one of their occasional sewer tours.
48. On foot, visit the accessible (above-ground) remnants of London's abandoned underground stations.  Just where is York Road station, anyway? 
49. Read a book by an author writing in a language you don't know a single word of.