This week Year 5 visited the National Archive in Kew as part of their Borough and the River Thames topic. The children took part in a workshop named ‘Mapping the City’ which involved studying maps of London dating back to the Tudor period and noticing the great changes the city has undergone in the last 500 years.
Studying the maps led to lots of discussion about how modern life is different from that of earlier time periods, and a debate about which time period would be the best to live in. After the trip, the classes walked back along the Thames to Borough Market, which gave them the opportunity to make comparisons between the maps they’d seen and the real, living London.