Year 5’s Trip to Fulham Palace

Today we visited Fulham Palace!

We started our trip by taking two tubes over to Putney Bridge to get to the Palace. The tubes were very busy but our drivers were lovely and made sure they gave us enough time to get on and off the trains. Once we arrived at the Palace we were met by Alex who would be leading our session about the Vikings. We found out that we were sat in the old Victorian stables, in particular, where they stored the coaches. Alex told us a little bit about the history of the palace and we found out that the site has been used to house the Bishop of London since the Anglo-Saxon era. We moved on to discuss the Vikings and we recapped that they were skilled farmers, builders and sailors. Alex explained that we can be fairly confident that the Vikings were, at one point, in Fulham. One way we looked at this was by observing the shield for Hammersmith and Fulham. We were asked if we could see any clues about the Vikings in there. Eventually, we spotted a longship!

We spoke about the fact that we can use writing to understand more about the past. There is a document called the Anglo-Saxon chronicles which was written in old English. We later used this to decipher a message which told us more about the Vikings in the area! Not only can we learn from the past through writing and stories, we also use objects (or artefacts) to find out about the past and how people lived their lives. We know that archaeologists work to excavate areas to learn about the past. Our first activity involved becoming archaeologists and digging around through layers of soil (or fabric in our case) to find different artefacts. We found plastic, a coin, a thimble and other valuables which we could place in our very own timeline.

It was soon time to get involved with other activities. One of our stations was decoding the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, another was to look at Viking artefacts and draw them but also to consider how we could find out more about them. The final station was where we were able to dress up, which lots of us really enjoyed! After we all travelled round these stations, we then came back together and some of us discussed which artefact we had drawn and what we were able to conclude. We saw necklaces which were shaped like Thor’s hammer. We learned that the Vikings worshipped many Gods… one being Thor! At the end of our workshop we even sang Alex a song from our assembly which we’re looking forward to performing on Friday!

We had a really brilliant time and would like to thank Alex for having us!

We would also like to say a huge thank you to the parents who came with us to help and to the SVPA for funding our trip.

What was your favourite part about our trip to Fulham Palace? What did you learn?