Tourism

Some museums manage to specialise in glass cabinets full of stuff. Sydney museum in Australia seems to manage this more relentlessly than any museum I've ever seen. At the maritime museum in Greenwich they seem to have gone away from this approach as deliberately as possible. The effect is one of the most interesting and engaging museums you could ever visit. It does of course help if you have an interest in Boats and Naval activity generally but you need not be an enthusiast to be captivated. As soon as you enter you are confronted with several displays of boats from different eras, this gets more involved as the various sections give you a history of navel exploration and even the grimmer areas like the role navel travel played in slavery and all sorts of other areas like from ship design to navigation.
There is of course a strong nod towards the child visitor and they have a whole floor devoted to "push boats" for the kids to dress up and generally ride around on their own boat (a car really) they also have a separate room staffed by enthusiastic and informed carers to get the kids involved in whatever themed activity they are doing that week (usually a craft of some sort).
It's one of those museums where you find it difficult to think of anything they could do better and its location (Greenwich) lends an air or authenticity of purpose that makes this one of the top museums in the world, certainly better than Sydney. And all this is just 35 mins drive away from Grays town centre.

Postcode: SE10 9NF