Traveling alone is a special kind of traveling, and it's something I really enjoy doing if museums or galleries are on my program. En route to Cornwall I had a day alone in London before I met up with my traveling friends, and since the London weather was predictably grey and I had no umbrella, I decided to head indoors. My gallery of choice was Tate Britain, mostly because it was the closest branch of the Tate to the hotel where I was meeting my friends, but it turned out to be well worth the half hour walk from Victoria Station.

The Tate Britain gallery is focused on British art from 1500 to modern day art; perhaps the highlight is the huge collection of Turner paintings, along with the works of other famous names such as Francis Bacon and Barbara Hepworth. It's housed in a small but regal building on the Thames River and was the very first of the Tate galleries, originally housing the entire collection during most of the twentieth century. In the 1980s and 1990s it was decided to expand to the galleries known as Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives, and finally the Tate Modern opened in 2000.

One of the biggest problems for me when I visit art galleries is deciding what to look at without getting overwhelmed by too many impressions from different kinds of art and artists. That's when I discovered a really neat promotion at the Tate Britain: they've developed small brochures called "Your Collection" which group a small number of paintings or other artworks together under a theme, and suggest that you check these out in detail.

But Tate Britain's "Your Collection" has not been put together under the usual mundane themes, but with a heap of creative thought behind it. For example, you can pick up the "I'm Hungover" collection brochure and take yourself on a self-guided tour past paintings which will be soothing to your sore head, or you can choose the "First Date" collection brochure which takes a more romantic look at things. Some of the themes are much simpler and more self-explanatory: for example, there's the "I Like Yellow" collection and the "I'm An Animal Freak" collection; personally I love the ideas behind the "I Haven't Been Here In Ages" collection and the "I Have A Big Meeting" collection. I wandered around Tate Britain for the best part of an afternoon, admittedly picking and mixing from these brochures, but it's an idea I'd love other galleries to adopt.