Great Ormond Street
25th February 2008

A party of five intrepid volunteer children went to London for the day to visit Great Ormond Street Hospital, where they treat children with all sorts of illnesses and medical conditions. We wanted to see if this was a charity the school might want to support, so we thought it would be a good idea to go and see it for ourselves.

We got the train from Goring station straight to Paddington. (We didn’t see any bears on the platform.) From there we got the tube to Russell Square. We had a tour of the hospital and were shown lots of interesting things. We heard how they are now rebuilding large sections of the hospital so they can treat even more children. Some of their patients are so dependent on the care they provide that they can never go home! Others who have illnesses or accidents find the best care there. We saw some children being moved around on trolleys.

We learned a lot which we able to share with the school. Claire and Hannah did most of the work on a Powerpoint presentation, but George, Cameron and Brandon took part in the meeting. In the end, the school decided to use World Book Day to dress up as characters from Peter Pan, as Great Ormond Street was given the publishing rights of this story by its author, J.M.Barrie. It has helped them raise a lot of money over the years. We even took part in a record-breaking attempt, reading a section of the new book, ‘Peter Pan in Scarlet’

As you can see from the pictures, we saw other interesting things in London. We walked past Buckingham Palace, played in St James’ Park and had a go being pavement artists outside the National Gallery, where Claire once pushed a policeman into a fountain. (It’s true! Ask her!) We were very tired when we got back, but it was a really good and very interesting day.