London is full of famous landmarks, but they’re not always the places you remember most. Whenever I find myself in London, there are a handful of places I always seem to end up visiting.
Not because they’re on a tourist trail, but because they’re simply places I enjoy being.
They could be places that you visit more than once, places where you always find something interesting, places that feel familiar, even if you don’t live nearby. For me, one of those places is the Wellcome Collection.
Standing opposite London Euston station, it is one of those buildings that could easily be missed if you are simply passing through on your way somewhere else. But step inside and you find a place full of curiosity, ideas and stories.
The exhibitions are always interesting. They make you stop, think and look at the world from a slightly different perspective.
Best of all, it is free to visit, making it one of those rare places in London where anyone can walk through the doors and discover something new. I cannot recommend a visit highly enough, it is accessible to all and the toilets are fantastic too.
I have been fortunate to spend a bit of time there over the years. Through my wife’s involvement with Broadening Horizons, a mentoring programme connected with the Wellcome Trust, I have had more opportunities to visit and explore the building as well as sitting in the cafe whilst reading or watching the world pass by.
Every time I go, I find something different, mainly because the exhibits change.
The Wellcome Trust itself has a fascinating history, it was founded through the will of Sir Henry Wellcome, the American born British pharmaceutical entrepreneur behind Burroughs Wellcome & Company, his fortune was transformed into a charitable foundation dedicated to improving human and animal health.
Today, it continues that work as one of the world’s largest independent charitable foundations, supporting research into areas including biomedical science, infectious diseases, mental health and global health challenges.
On my last visit, the thing that stayed with me most wasn’t something displayed behind glass.
It was a blank space on a wall.
Coming of Age
On 3rd June 2026, I visited the Wellcome Collection to see the Coming of Age exhibition.
The exhibition explores what it means to grow older.
Not just the physical process of ageing, but the experiences, expectations and emotions that come with moving through life.
At the end of the exhibition, visitors were invited to answer a simple question. There were pieces of cards with the question written at the top of it, the questions were different, it, you just get whatever is at the top. I got,
“Something I wish my younger self had known about being older is…”
And then below the question, there is a space to put your response.
I stood there for a while, well, I ended up sat as it really was a while. There are many answers I could have given. Something funny, something philosophical, something that sounds wise, but the answer I found myself writing came from experience.
I shall save you the exact details, but, I wrote about how, when we are young, time feels almost limitless.
There will always be another year, another trip, another conversation, another chance to do the things we keep putting off. Then life teaches you that time is not something to be taken for granted.
My own experiences with serious illness changed the way I look at almost everything.
These experiences made me realise that life is not measured by the years we imagine are ahead of us, but by what we choose to do with the days we are given. It changed how I approach things, I dress the way I want to dress, I visit the places I want to see, I make the effort to spend time with the people who matter, no matter how far away they are. I worry less about what strangers think and more about whether the people I love know they are loved.
Getting older didn’t teach me that time is precious, It taught me that time was precious all along.
Underneath the words I wrote, I added a small sketch of an astronaut, the ‘one’ that features in my daily drawings.
This one had a slightly different meaning, in a way, a little explorer, a tiny traveller.
That astronaut has appeared many times over the months in my daily drawings. Usually carrying coffee, waiting for the weekend, looking towards the moon, or simply existing somewhere between here and there, perhaps it was fitting that he… I… ended up there.
I guess that life is a little bit like space travel, we are all exploring, boldly, somewhere that we have never been before.
Anyway, I wrote my short essay… and placed it on the board at the exit of the exhibition… I haven’t given it a thought since. 
The Message
When I left the exhibition that day, I didn’t think much more about it.
I assumed my words would become one small contribution amongst many, something someone might read for a few seconds before getting bored and moving on, or, just covered up by someone else’s response if space ran out.
After leaving the Wellcome Collection, I walked across the road and had a beer at the Euston Tap. It was a simple moment that formed part of a good day. It was a memory being made without knowing that it was a memory at the time.
Then, fast forwards to the 21st July, when I received a message.
It went in to the ‘requests’ spot, usually reserved for those spam bots going on about their shy friend fancying me or informing me that my bitcoin is at risk… However, this one was different, It was from someone I had never met and obviously, didn’t know.
They explained that they had visited the exhibition, found my response at the end, and taken the time to reach out to me.
They told me that my words had resonated with them as they approached a new chapter in their own life. They thanked me for sharing my thoughts and wished me well, hoping that my response would continue to reach others who found it on the wall.
Since receiving the message and starting to write this article, I have found myself thinking about the person who sent me that message. Right now, they are standing on the edge of adulthood, looking ahead in much the same way I once did. When I look back to when I was that age, even thoughI felt like I had done a lot already, I didn’t really know where or who I was. I wonder what they what they will think about those words in twenty years’ time. Will they even remember reading them? Will they see them differently? Will life have taught them something completely different?
Perhaps they will smile at how little they agreed with me. Or perhaps they’ll find themselves nodding in recognition, having discovered for themselves that time has a habit of passing more quickly than we ever imagine.
I wonder, too, whether my words will still be there, in some way, whether they’ll still be pinned to a wall somewhere. Whether any other strangers stopped to read them.
The truth is, I don’t know., but perhaps that’s the point.
That message, genuinely, meant more to me than I can explain.
Because, when we put something into the world, we rarely get to see where it goes, a conversation just ends, a photograph disappears down a social media feed and a handwritten note is read and left behind.
Occasionally though, something reaches someone at exactly the right moment… I like to think about messages in a bottle at this point.
Anyway, sometimes, they let you know. We have seen the pieces where people find bottles on the beach and respond to them… or, controversially, when we were kids at school, releasing balloons into the atmosphere with a tag attached to see how far they would get… with a disregard for the bad they would do… I can tell, I am digressing slightly… This little note of mine had ‘got somewhere’, someone took it in and appreciated it, even if only in a small way.
Forty Eight Days
What that message also did was take me back to that moment, back to the exhibition, back to me being sat on the bench and writing those words, back to the to the beer in the Euston Tap with friends afterwards, friends I had not seen for a while.
And then I thought about the time that had passed since then, it was only a short space of time, Forty eight days to be exact. Yet, in that ‘short time’, since leaving those words on that wall so much life had happened.
There had been the EDGY Expo in Perth, I had travelled to Limoges in France for a long weekend, my daughter completed both the practice and final expeditions for her Silver Duke of Edinburgh Award and finished year ten at school, after being made deputy head girl for the following year!!! I had sat beside the sea in Scarborough eating fish and chips, I had celebrated a 90th birthday with afternoon tea in a beautiful city centre hotel, I had travelled to Tenerife to surprise a friend for his 50th birthday at his bar with an old friend who a year ago was given twelve months to live.
Forty eight days. Forty eight days of moments that could easily have passed unnoticed, in a way, that was exactly the thing I had written about.
We often imagine time as something measured in years, but, life happens in moments. A coffee, a beer, a walk, a conversation, a trip, a meal beside the sea.
The things we remember are rarely the things we planned perfectly but they are the moments we were present enough to notice.
Bringing It Back To The Coop.
Whenever I visit London, or anywhere for that matter, I have always tried to connect my trips with the EDCCooperative in some way.
For me, cities are not just about buildings and attractions. Genuinely, they are about people… whether it’s sat having a coffee, watching them go by, or meeting them and sharing a coffee.
They are about shared experiences, the conversations over coffee or a beer, meeting someone for the first time and discovering you have more in common than you expected.
One of my favourite places near Euston is the Euston Tap, It sits directly opposite the Wellcome Collection, right at the entrance to Euston station, inside one of the surviving Victorian gatehouses from the original Euston Station.
These small Portland stone buildings are all that remain of a much grander Victorian station that once stood there. The famous Euston Arch was demolished in the 1960s, along with much of the original station, but these little lodges survived. Today, one has become the Euston Tap, a craft beer bar with a unique sense of place, It is a fascinating little building, tiny inside, with a narrow spiral staircase leading to a small upstairs seating area… and toilets… it can be a perilous journey after one too many sherbets.
If you look closely at the stonework outside and you can still see reminders of its railway past, with historic destinations carved into the walls. It is small piece of history that survived while everything around it changed. I think there is something fitting about that and this story.
The small things matter. A building, a conversation, a sketch, a few words written on a wall, a sticker on the back of an unnamed pub’s toilet door…
We often don’t realise the importance of things until much later.
The Things We Leave Behind
The EDCCooperative has always been about more than the objects we carry.
A pocket knife, a notebook, possibly your watch, maybe the camera, almost always that favourite pen. The things we carry are often reminders of places we have been and people we have shared moments with but perhaps the most important things we carry are the stories we get to tell, the lessons we have learned, the memories we have shared or made, the kindness someone showed us. The words someone left behind!
On 3rd June, I visited the Wellcome Collection expecting to see an exhibition, I left having left something behind and on the 21st July, a stranger reminded me that we never really know where our words will travel.
Maybe that is one of the greatest lessons of getting older, we are all leaving little pieces of ourselves behind, we just don’t always get to see who finds them.
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