The highy successful Royal River exhibition at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich has entered its final weeks.

It is due to close on September 9th but tickets are still available.

Guest curated by historian David Starkey, 'Royal River,Power,Pageantry and the Thames' explores the varied uses of the Thames across five hundred years of British history.

The hundreds of  objects brought together by the museum include a remarkable collection of paintings by Canaletto, the oldest known copy of Handel’s Water Music, Bazalgette’s original contract drawings for the construction of the Thames embankment, Anne Boleyn’s personal music book, the magnificent stern carvings from the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert III, and a stuffed swan.

Among the paintings, manuscripts and artefacts are rarely seen uniforms, silver and barge decorations from the City of London’s many livery companies, an elaborate silver microscope made for George III and the sixteenth-century Pearl Sword, which to this day the monarch must touch upon entering the City of London.

When it opened David Starkey said: “This exhibition, which brings to life the extraordinary and varied history of the Thames as Britain’s royal river and London's ‘grandest street’, is a feast for the eyes and all the senses.  It evokes the sights, sounds and even the smells of half a millennium of royal river pageantry and popular celebration.

“Most importantly and originally, Royal River also shows how the grandest royal river pageants have always been used to celebrate the coronation and inauguration of Tudor and Stuart Queens. What more appropriate way of celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of The Queen, who will lead another grand royal river pageant?”

A wealth of fascinating objects take visitors from Anne Boleyn’s coronation procession to Lord Nelson’s funeral, from the gilded magnificence of the Lord Mayor’s pageant to the noxious horror of the ‘Great Stink’, and from the great riverside seats of regal power to the floating palaces of the royal yachts.

The exhibition comprises nearly 400 objects, including 50 objects from the Royal Collection and over 250 items on loan from museums, galleries and private collections across Europe and America, many of which have never been on public display before. It also draws on an array of objects from the National Maritime Museum’s own  collections.

Link to Royal River exhibition website